conbining mapIDs and condtional build tags?

[fonnes]

Hi
I am working on a new project. We want to produce at least two different versions of help using Webhelp and mapIDs. Is it possible to combine mapIDs with conditional build tags so that one version can include some parts of a topic and the other not? I have not been able to find any information about this.
I am using Robohelp X5.0.2.

[Peter Grainge]

Welcome to the forum.

You can use both in a project.

If you use the tags to exclude some of the content, the topic is still in the build and the map id will call it, with the content as defined by the expression.

The only thing that you cannot do, obviously, is exclude a whole topic with a tag and then use the map id.

[CraigCC]

Hi Fonnes,

Could you provide a little more detail on what you are trying to achieve? I'm just thinking that the developer may be able to help you out by calling a different build of the help via the application. Or are you trying to create different help version for different users? Any additional information you can provide may help us suggest different approaches.

I've been in a similar situation were the developers used their own conditional tags within the code to call different help topic depending on the user login for example. They created conditions that pointed to different directories that contained different builds of the help. As Peter says, there is no need to use different map ids but just exclude/include content in each of the help outputs.

Just a thought
Craig

cheers
Craig

[fonnes]

Thanks for the prompt response.
What I am trying to acheive is two different "versions" of documentation for two different approaches to our product. Yes, you could say two user groups.

Most of the topics will contain information that will be used in both versions, but the groups will use different methods for doing certain things. I don't want to have to maintain the common information in more than one place, so I hoped I could put everything into one topic like this:
Description
How to 1
How to 2

Then I would like to be able to say that version 1 should include the description and How to 1, while version 2 contains the description and How to 2. That's fine as far as creating a single souce layout is concerned.

But can I do the same using Map IDs? In other words, if a user clicks for help in one place I want to show version1, but if Help is clicked in another place I want to show version 2.

Hope this makes it somewhat clearer.

[CraigCC]

Yes it does make it a lot clearer.

quote:

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But can I do the same using Map IDs? In other words, if a user clicks for help in one place I want to show version1, but if Help is clicked in another place I want to show version 2.

---

You would need to assign different mapIds to each version to achieve this. This would mean creating and maintain two sets of mapids files - using one for each version. That would give you two sets of topics with excluded content, each with different map Ids. But that is going to make life complicated firstly from a maintenance point of view and secondly, how are you going to manage the content that is displayed when the user views the main TOC, Index and Search?

Life will be a lot easier if you simply create version 1 that excludes all 'How tos' for one approach and version 2 of the help that excludes all 'How to's' for the second approach. The approach I would take is to ask the developer to create two buttons one that calls Version 1 of the help and one that calls Version 2 of the help. These builds of the help would simply be located in different directories but use the same map id.

And then when the user clicks on the 'Show All' button, they will open the relevant content with ALL the relevant how tos.

I'm assuming that you will only ever need to use the same set of 'How tos' for each approach?

Hope that makes sense
Craig

[fonnes]

Yes, I think I see the point., but I think I'll need to do some testing.

Anyway, thanks a lot.