Managing Custom builds and additional options

[Danny Fitton]

Ok, I hope I can make this clear enough.

I have a single project for all the machines that my company produces.

The Custom builds has each machine type in it as the machine structure is very similar.
Machine 1, machine 2 etc.
When publishing I simply select the required “machine type” from the custom builds.
What I am struggling with is the “Customer Options” part. These are specific to individual customers.
What I have at present is a Topic called “Customer Options” then I’m adding the serial number of each machine to Custom Builds. The customer options are stored in an individual word document specific to each customer (organised via machine serial numbers). This file is connected to the project as an inserted OLE object (from file) – not displayed as an icon as I need it to be visible when printed. Each serial number calls a specific file using the conditional statements.
To publish the manual the machine type is selected and the serial from the Custom builds section in the publish page.
The problem that I have is that the Customer options topic is becoming very large and difficult to manage with all the conditional statements IF s/n123456 (OLE object) ENDIF.

How can I tidy this section up, I don’t mind having the serial numbers in the custom builds but I just want the file icon or path of the customer options. So I can just add a conditional statement pointing to that file to include in the project.
I thought about adding the files to the baggage files and linking them in with a conditional statement but not sure how to do this.
Do you have any ideas?

Thanks

[Tim Green]

Hi Danny,

There is one trick you might want to try that would reduce the cruft in your project: Create multiple projects containing just one topic with exactly the same topic ID in each case, and set up each version for the customer you want to use. You can have additional build options within the topics if you also want that -- then the same build options must be defined in all the 1-topic projects.

Then insert all those projects in the position where the topic containing the as modules, using Add Topic > Include Help Project with the "Merge content on publishing" option. Then you can apply your build options to the main insertion node of each module to include or exclude it.

You just have to be very careful to never publish more than one of these topic modules at the same time, because they all have the same topic ID.