Snippet Pod Problems

[Pat4]

I have a project in RH7 with several hundred snippets. When I open the Snippet Pod and try to scroll down the list to select a snippet the Pod flickers and immediately returns me to the top of the list when I let go of either the scroll bar or the scroll arrow. It happens so fast that I don't have a chance to select a snippet. I need to be able to access the snippets through the pod because that is the only way I know of to change the snippet name or delete the snippet. I can edit the snippet through the topic page it is linked to.

Any help is appreciated!

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

Seriously? Several *HUNDRED* snippets? Wow! Why the need for so many?

Anyway, I digress. Are you able to simply click in the pod and use the arrow keys to traverse from snippet to snippet? Perhaps that's a possible workaround for you.

I've never seen a need to use more than a handful of snippets myself, so I'm very curious as to how you are using them. I'm not saying you are using them wrongly, I'm sure you have your reasons. But I'd love to hear more about it.

Cheers... Rick

[Pat4]

We are using RH7 to write curriculum for all job roles in the organization. We are using the snippets for learning elements that are common to many job roles (soft skills for example). By using the snippets it makes it much easier to keep all roles current when the content in the topic changes. By using so many snippets we can easily customize the curriculum for each role, for example one role needs Presentation basics and another doesn't.

Yes, I tried clicking on a snippet and scrolling down with the keyboard down arrow with no luck. I am starting to think it may have something to do with files name length. Some of the file names are pretty long (I didn't create the project, I just inherited it).

[Captiv8r]

Hi again

Okay, I have a thought. Beware, I'm an outside the box sort of thinker. So you have been forewarned.

What if you created one or more topics where their sole purpose was to hold snippets and make it easier for you to locate and edit them? You mentioned that you could edit this way. So my thought is that you would simply insert snippets one after the other. Since the pod seems to be giving you fits, you would just open the topic(s) and find the snippet you want there. Then double-click to work with the snippet.

Not sure if this is what you were looking for, but may be worth trying.

Cheers... Rick

[Pat4]

You're not that far out of the box. I have already done that. RH7 makes it very difficult to organize snippets so I use several storage topic pages to keep all of my snippets where I can sort and organize them as I need. I can either copy them from the storage topic into the topic pages where i want them to display. Moving a little further out of the box I found I can make a copy of the project in another folder or another drive and I can actually import the html page from the copied project and edit it faster than I can copy and move topics within a single project.

Editing snippets this way is easy, it is changing the name and deleting the snippet that causing the problem

Thanks for all your good ideas.

[Guest]

Is anyone using a large number of snippets in RH8? I have a new project where we were thinking of creating 100-200 to deal with a similar situation that Pat@ffic mentioned in this thread. Of course, I don't want to encounter the same issue. I'm also interested in any other outside-the-box solutions anyone has come up with for reusing many chunks of text that can be updated/deleted/added in one central place. A big problem I see with the Snippets Pod is the lack of structure.... we really need to be able to organize them in folders. (I may submit that as a feature request, actually.) For now we are planning on using a consistent naming convention and are going to try to keep the titles brief, but it's going to be tricky. I like Rick's suggestion (at least I think it was Rick; can't see the whole thread as I'm writing this) to create master pages that simply serve as snippet warehouses to organize them/access them more easily, but we'd still have to work within the confines of the Snippets Pod often since that's the only way to add/delete.

I appreciate anyone's thoughts or experiences with this, particularly if you've discovered any differences in RH8.

Thanks,

Katie Carver

Docs-to-You, LLC

Phoenix, AZ