Any Method or Workaround Available to Insert Variable in Topic Title?

[roger832]

We are planning to implement variables in the next release of our Help to ease the replacement of certain terms. We develop webhelp in RH8. While variables work very well for terms within a topic and titles of TOC books and TOC pages, there seems to be a serious problem regarding topic titles and search results.

When you rename TOC books and TOC pages, you can insert a variable in the title, so these update automatically when you change the value of the variable. However, you cannot insert a variable in the topic title (I'm assuming because the <title> tags are in the document head.).This causes a serious problem with search results. For example:

• You create a variable for the term "Digital Assets," which is the default name of the item. This term is also used in many topic titles, such as "Creating Digital Assets."
• You insert this variable in all the relevant topics, TOC book titles, and TOC page titles.
• You change the value of the variable to "Analog Debits." The value is correclty substituted in all instances of the variable in topics & titles.
• You build the Help. The terminology is correct everywhere.
• However, when you search for Analog Debits, the topic titles returned are still Creating Digital Assets, etc.

Of course, you can go through and manually change every title occurance of Digital Assets to Analog Debits, rebuild the project, and the search results will be "correctly" titled. However, manual labor on this scale defeats the purpose of variables.

Have I missed an easy way to change topic titles, or is the inability to insert variables in a topic title an oversight that I recommend Adobe address?

Thanks,

Roger

[Peter Grainge]

Topic Title is part of the topic properties so you cannot use variables. However the first heading in the topic does not have to be the same as the Topic Title. Could you not use a variable there? The topic title would remain the same so it might still be caught by search, maybe you could live with that?

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@petergrainge

[roger832]

This is exactly what I've done - used a variable in Header 1, which generates search results like these:

This really isn't acceptable, so I'll just have to coach our customers who want to customize the Help to manually change the appropriate topic titles.

[Captiv8r]

Hi all

Okay, here's a possible workaround for you. I tested this with Version 8 and it seems to work so far.

In your topic, insert the variable as desired. Then change to HTML view. You should see that the variable exists something like this:

<?rh-udv_start name="topic" ?>Variable Content Here<?rh-udv_end ?>

So I copied this and pasted it between the Title tags.

Before:

<title>Topic Title here</title>

After:

<title><?rh-udv_start name="topic" ?>Variable Content Here<?rh-udv_end  ?></title>

Then I saved and closed the topic. Note that I DID NOT CHANGE BACK TO DESIGN VIEW. This part is crucial. When you change to Design View, RoboHelp ever so helpfully rewrites your Title tags to remove the variable information you so carefully inserted there.

I tested this by changing the variable and generating and it does seem to work. That is, UNTIL you open the topic again in Design View. Then it will fail.

The way I figure it, RoboHelp is going to scan the code looking for the special UDV tags and it won't care if they exist within the title tags.

Cheers... Rick

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[roger832]

Thanks for your suggestions. I've tried inserting the variable in the HTML, and experienced similiar results. The problem is, next time you click that topic, it automatically opens in design view, which does two things:

1) Replaces the title with the current variable value.

2) Moves the variable information from the header to the body.

Here's an actual code snippet showing both:

<title>Understanding Analog Debits</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../AprimoHelp.css" type="text/css" />
</head>

<body>
<?rh-udv_start name="DigitalAssets" ?>Analog Debits<?rh-udv_end ?>
<div class="parahelp">
<h1>Understanding <?rh-udv_start name="DigitalAssets" ?>Analog Debits<?rh-udv_end ?></h1>

[Captiv8r]

I thought I mentioned that opening the topic in Design View again would cause the behavior you pointed out. At least I thought I did.

I advised that the key to it working is to not work in Design View.

What I didn't say was that if you DO have a need to work in Design View, you will need to repeat the process of adding the variable code in the title tags. You might be able to help some by storing the code as an HTML comment just above or below the title tags. Then it would be as simple as uncommenting or using some copy/paste magick.

So you asked for a workaround. There it is. You may not like it but it's the best we can come up with so far. Please do take a moment and complete a Wish Form to ask for this to change in a future version. You aren't the first and probably won't be the last to encounter this situation.

Cheers... Rick

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[Gravenstein]

For what it's worth, I've been using the following construction to include a variable in my topic "title." It is stable, and does not revert in design view. I have just a couple of instances of this, but it is used in several projects, and I haven't had any reports of problems.

It's a Heading One constructed like this:

[Topic Title] text [Variable]

For example, consider the topic heading "Creating My Topic Name". The topic title is "Creating" and the UDV named "varName" has the value "Topic Name". "My" is just text. The HTML code in the topic looks like this:

<h1><?rh-variable_start name="title" format="default" showcode="showcode"
       value="Creating" ?>Creating<?rh-variable_end ?>
My <?rh-udv_start name="varName" ?>Topic Name<?rh-udv_end ?></h1>

I don't know if the text part is required for success or not. I haven't experimented with removing the text part or reordering the elements.

G

[Captiv8r]

Hi G

You are doing what Peter suggested.

You are using the variable for the first line of text on the topic. That is different than the actual Topic Title. The Topic Title is used when Search finds topics as well as when a topic appears all alone without the surrounding WebHelp/FlashHelp frameset. It's an attribute of the topic that normally isn't all that visible to the end user.

It is found in the HTML code.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7 or 8 within the day - $24.95! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[Peter Grainge]

Exactly. The first line of a topic is NOT the Topic Title, it just takes that as the default. It is the Topic Heading and you can do what you want with that.

Don't forget, the TOC will take the topic title as the default but, again, you can change that.

---

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@petergrainge

[Gravenstein]

Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying, Rick and Peter.

G