Difference between toggler link & drop down

[Jane Dudgeon]

Hi all
I am new to the forum and trying well, struggling really, to figure out how Flare works. I read the online Help about toggler links and drop down. I may be dense, but I just do not see the difference between these two. The descriptions sound like they both hide or show text if user clicks the link. Can someone give me a good example of each and when you would use the toggler over the drop down or drop down over the toggler please?
Thanks
Jane

[NorthEast]

A drop-down shows/hides a single bit of content (text, images, whatever) directly underneath the drop-down's title. You might use it for something like a question and answer.

A toggler is slightly different in that it can show/hide multiple bits of content that can be located anywhere in the topic. It is slightly more complicated to set up as you have to name each bit you want to show/hide and then link them to the toggler. You might use it for something like switching on/off a number of screenshots in a topic, or a number of optional steps in a list.

[KevinDAmery]

From a code point of view, one of the main differences between togglers and drop downs is that a dropdown completely contains the content you want to show / hide, whereas a toggler does not. This doesn't affect what someone viewing your help sees, but it does have an affect on how you design your topics.

For example, one question that has come up on the forums before is how to apply show / hide capabilities to screen shots for online use, but to have the screen shot be visible in print but *without* the text that the user would click on in the online help (in other words, for online you have something like "Click to view image" - this would look silly in print, of course). If you used a dropdown, you would have a hard time doing this, because if you apply the print-only condition to the dropdown hot spot it also affects anything contained in the dropdown. If you use a toggler, though, you don't have this problem: you can condition out the "Click to view image" line without affecting the screen shot in any way.

Another advantage of togglers is that you can set one toggler to trigger more than one content item. For example, one of our MVPs includes a toggler at the top of her topics that shows / hides all of the images in the topic with one click.

[tbean]

Jane,
This confused me, too. I posted a similar question a few months ago and received some very good responses, including information on how to use drop-downs and togglers within lists (and get the numbering you want), and a few bits about using them in tables as well.

Here is the thread:
http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... f=4&t=6191