Conditions! Ability to exclude draft content

[caropops]

*Quick question*
I want to be able to mark a folder of content as draft in the Content Explorer and have it excluded from my output - even though I have topics within that folder that are marked with conditions that are included in the output. Flare includes the topics which have included conditions. Does anyone have a workaround for excluding a whole folder, e.g for review scenarios?

*Longer explanation*
We have a project where our content topics are split into six folders representing six main product areas. There are many different users of the product, and therefore many different audiences for the help. We have made use of four conditions for this purpose – let’s call them A-type, B-type, C-type and D-type.
• Some topics are relevant to only one of our user types, so they have one condition applied.
• Some topics are relevant to two of our user types, so they have two conditions applied. (A-type and B-type, A-type and C-type, B-type and D-type, and so on).
• Some topics are relevant to three of our user types, so they’ll have three conditions applied (A-type, B-type and D-type – or other combinations).
• Some topics are relevant to all users, so have no conditions applied.
We have put a lot of effort into applying the relevant styles to the topics.

We output to HTML5. We have four separate deliverables to accommodate the four different user types. We have set up four targets: A, B, C, and D.
• Target A includes content that is has the A-type condition applied (and by default everything that has no conditions).
• Target B includes content that has the B-type condition applied (and by default everything that has no conditions).
• And so on for Targets C and D.
This all works well, and allows us to generate the four deliverables with appropriate content in each.

However… We now need to create output but exclude one product area where the topics are in early stages – they are not complete and must not be output in this deliverable. We created another condition (Draft) and applied it to the top-level folder for that product area (to be clear, we want to prevent ALL of the topics under this folder from being included in this deliverable). We found that the conditions that we have set against the individual topics in this folder (A-type and B-type, etc) mean that the topics are being included in the output even though the folder is set as Draft which is excluded from the output. We tried adding the draft condition to the topics within the folder, but as they also have other conditions applied, they were included. We cannot set the A-type, B-type etc conditions to be excluded as they must be included in the output for the remainder of the project. We have concluded that the include conditions take priority over the exclude conditions for an individual topic.
For now, we have created a new TOC which does not include the area that we need to exclude from the help, but this is not a workable solution as the topics ARE actually in the output and we can see them in search results.
We need a way to tell Flare to ignore a whole folder when generating an output.

Has anyone been in this situation and how did you work around it please?

[NorthEast]

I'd consider that to be a bug - the condition on the folder should take precedence over the topics in that folder.

Anyway, you might have to use Advanced conditions; e.g.:

Conditions.A and not ( Conditions.Draft )

See - https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare20 ... ssions.htm

[ChoccieMuffin]

Yup, definitely a case for using the advanced condition editor. It confuses the heck out of me every time I need to change my conditions, so that help page Dave has linked to is my go-to.

So in your case, if you want to include all your A-type topics, and exclude all your Draft topics (which may also have A-type condition), then your conditional expression should be:

A-type AND NOT Draft

AND and OR are quite powerful, and can be complicated and thoroughly confusing if you have lots and lots of conditions to include or exclude in combination, so you might want to have a play in a "sandpit" project and see what you get. I find it particularly confusing when using OR NOT, because the order of preferences can be a bit tricky to follow if you have conditions on your targets that are several lines long, but I think you'll find the solution I've suggested does the trick for you.

[doloremipsum]

I have a similar situation where I want to exclude everything tagged OEM.B, include everything tagged OEM.A (even if also tagged OEM.B), and exclude everything tagged ContentState.Draft (even if tagged with the others). Here's what I came up with:

(OEM.A and OEM.B) or not OEM.B and not ContentState.Draft

Well, actually replace OEM.B with three OEMs (OEM.B or OEM.C or OEM.D) and ContentState.Draft with a bunch of different tags. But you get the idea. Remember that you don't need to explicitly include anything just tagged OEM.A - if it isn't in the expression, it will be included by default.

[caropops]

Thank you all. I knew there MUST be a way to do this and that Flare wouldn't let me down.

Advanced conditions! New to me, but I can see they are powerful and are definitely the way to solve this problem. I think I've got the right expression, but might just have a wee bit more of a play to make sure.

For those interested in following this through, I'm looking at using advanced conditions similar to:
(General.B-type or General.ScreenOnly or not (General.A-type or General.C-type or General.D-type or General.PrintOnly)) AND NOT General.DRAFT

This allows me to output content for B-type users (but not the others) AND not anything that is marked as DRAFT (sorry there are also a couple of PrintOnly/ScreenOnly conditions in there which I didn’t mention in the original question!). Happily, it seems that I can apply the DRAFT condition to a folder only, and it will exclude all topics within that folder even if they include some included conditions (in this case B-type). Which is exactly what I wanted to do! Brilliant

I'm in love with Flare all over again.