Breadcrumbs not compatible with multiple instances of a topic in TOC; any solution?

[Guest]

My master page places a breadcrumb on every page in my project.

When I add a topic to the TOC in two or more places, and I compile the project and click the second or the nth instance of said topic in the TOC, the TOC always "jumps" to the first instance. I cannot look at the second or the nth instance of that topic in the TOC. (Of course, the text is identical in all n places, but I want to TOC to stay in the branch that the user expects to be.) BUT IF I TAKE THE BREADCRUMB OUT of the master page, the multiple instances of a topic behave perfectly. If I cannot use breadcrumbs, I'll have a huge problem. Can this be fixed?

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

My guess is that the breadcrumbs are a red herring. Normally what causes the bizarre jumping around is the fact that the project has been configured to synchronize the TOC with the displayed topic.

One way past this is to never link more than once to a topic in the TOC. Of course, this causes an issue if you need more than one TOC entry point into the topic, no? So there are a couple of ways past it.

• Use redirect pages that point to the desired topic. This way the Redirect page synchronizes with the TOC and you still see the topic.
• Use an Inline Frame (IFRAME) to display the topic inside another page. Similar to the Redirect technique, but instead of loading another page, you present a page with a window that displays the topic.

Hopefully something here either helps directly or sparks a thought that does.

Cheers... Rick

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[Guest]

The bad behavior occurs whether I set

File > Generate Primary Layout > Additional Options > Edit > TOC Styles > Styles > "Always Show Selection"

or NOT.

When you say to try a "redirect page", .... I'm clever and can figure stuff out :-), but please give me a nudge.

My temporary solution is this: I created a special Master Page for use on topics that are used more than once, and the special page has everything except the Breadcrumb. On the topics that are used more than once, I type the breadcrumb BY HAND (and I type about three breadcrumbs by hand to demonstrate that the topic can come up in three places). This is a nuisance, but it steers around the bug.

But if anybody has additional advice, I'm still interested.

[Nick27]

Could you just make the topic that is repeating in the TOC a snippet, and embed it in multiple topics, that way your ifnormation is still from a single source, you just have multiple containing topics, that are unique and the breadcrumbs will resemble that.

[MDoogieY]

In my case, since I'm using generated files in this project, a snippet isn't practical.  I'd have to create a snippet from each reused topic and update the snippet every time the original generated topic changes.  And, if I understand correctly, I'd also have to create many additional files to hope the snippet.

In my usage context; a reference guide, the TOC provides not only multiple entry points, but also uses See Also links.

What would be ideal is a way to designate a single instance within the TOC as the primary.

[Captiv8r]

HI there

You said:

In my case, since I'm using generated files in this project, a snippet isn't practical.  I'd have to create a snippet from each reused topic and update the snippet every time the original generated topic changes.  And, if I understand correctly, I'd also have to create many additional files to hope the snippet.

In my usage context; a reference guide, the TOC provides not only multiple entry points, but also uses See Also links.

What would be ideal is a way to designate a single instance within the TOC as the primary.

The actual topic content would only reside in the snippet. What you wrote seems to imply you believe that you would have to perform updates on both the snippet as well as any topics using the snippet. That's not the case.

Sorry, aside from using this approach or possibly another approach where you insert iFrames in topics and nominate the desired topic as the iFrame source, there is no way to designate a single TOC instance as you are wanting.

Cheers... Rick

[MDoogieY]

I have a lot of topics reuse so typing breadcrumbs by hand, particularly recreating the linking, is not a reasonable option.