Ordering Topics

[winchy]

I am just new to Flare Va3.1 and I am in the process of planning how my on-line help might look to the user.

1. How do you control the order in which the topics will be displayed in the completed project? eg I am doing on-line help for an application and want to document each menu item and then each sub menu item.

2. Can you creat a subtopic? eg I was thining that each sub menu item could be a subtopic.

or are we restricted to creating a topic for each new piece of information to be displayed to the user?

Your assistance to a newbie would be appreciated.

[SteveS]

Hi Winchy,

Welcome to the forums.

To do both of the things you asked about you use the Table of Contents, normally MasterTOC. The TOC in this case is just used as the build template - The actual TOC in your help (although it looks the same) is built by Flare when you compile.

HTH

[NorthEast]

As, SteveS mentioned above, you set up the order of the topics in your TOC.

or are we restricted to creating a topic for each new piece of information to be displayed to the user?

Each item in the TOC doesn't need to be linked to a separate topic though, you can link it to a bookmark or heading inside a topic (e.g. if you have a long topic with lots of different sections in it).
To do this, open the item's properties in the TOC and click Select Bookmark.

[LTinker68]

And the TOC doesn't control what's in the final output, at least not for WebHelp (it does for print output). If you're building WebHelp, everything is included in the output folders, unless you apply an exclusion conditional tag to the topic itself. So you can have TopicA link to TopicB even if TopicB isn't in the TOC.