RH8 Master page with chained select menu

[Guest]

Hi,

I have a Master page with chained select menu in the header that functions appropriately when I preview the master page, however when I add the master page to a topic the chained select menu does not work.  I believe the master page.htt is at the root level of the site.  I have tried adjusting the relative position of the .js files to accommodate for the topics being in sub folders but that has not worked either.  Additionally I have tried to add the javascript directly on the master page and that does work not either when I apply the master page to a topic. If anyone can provide any insight into this issue, I will be forever appreciative.  Thank you for you time.

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

Can you please expound a bit? For example, what exactly is a "chained select menu"?

How exactly are you applying the Master Page to the topic(s)?

Cheers... Rick

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[Guest]

Here is the link to the chained select menu that I used.

http://dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex16/chainedselects/chainedselects.html

[mleetmaa]

Hi Rick,

I was helping on this as well and the way the master page is being applied is through going to the properties of the existing topic and then selecting the master page from the drop down and then saving the topic.

[Captiv8r]

Ahhh, gotcha!

Usually stuff like that relies heavily on custom JavaScript files. One common issue is that folks don't realize they need to ensure the .JS file (if that's how it's working) needs to be included among your project files. RoboHelp typically is unaware of these even though you have added them to your topic(s). So you have to add them to the Baggage Files area.

Have you done this?

Cheers... Rick

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[Guest]

Yes, they are at root level.  I tried to adjust the master page in order to accomodate the pages coming from the sub topic folders.  No matter what I try, I cannot get the chained select menus to work on the topic pages.  It does however work on the master page.

[Captiv8r]

Hi again

One thing to look for is how the reference to the .JS file appears. (Again, you haven't said as much, but I'm working under the assumption that you are dealing with an externally referenced .JS file here.)

As I see it there are two approaches you can take.

The first approach is just a bit on the kludgy side but may be the easiest. It involves adding the external .JS file repeatedly as baggage so it is inside each and every folder. It's kludgy as you really don't want all those different .JS files. But you may not care about that.

The second approach is a bit of work, but would leave a single copy of the .JS file at the root level. What you likely need to do to get things working in this approach is to hand edit each topic to ensure the correct HTML shorthand has been applied to the .JS reference. The shorthand usually looks a bit like this:

../../SomeFile.JS

What is different is that each topic is likely in a different folder level. So the number of ../ levels depends on how deep the folder is. Usually you can figure out exactly how many to add by looking at the Style Sheet reference. Just copy any ../ preceding the .CSS reference and prepend it to your .JS reference. The down side to this approach is that if you later modify the Master Page and re-apply it, likely it will hose your reference and break the functionality again.

Please take a moment to report this as a bug. It would seem that applying the Master Page isn't correctly calculating any reference to a .JS file.

Cheers... Rick

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[Amebr]

With the Templates in RH6 and below, if you add a script into the template, the script is only added to new topics created from the template, not existing topics. So you have to manually add the script reference to your existing topics.

The easiest way I've found is to add the script to the template, create a new temporary topic at each level you need, and just copy the script code from the temporary topic as this will have the correct levels added automatically.

I assume this behaviour is the same with RH8, although I haven't tried it yet.

Let me know if you'd like code snippets to illustrate.

Amebr