Need help noodling 1-stop maintenance for pop-ups & a topic

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Dave Gehman
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Joined: Sat Sep 23, 2017 9:05 pm

Need help noodling 1-stop maintenance for pop-ups & a topic

Unread post by Dave Gehman »

Scenario:
WebHelp help that needs the same verbiage across pop-ups and a conventional topic. Example:
-- viewer happily reads along, comes upon a term in a topic's text -- let's call it "Design" for example. The word "Design" in the topic is fitted with a pop-up that pops up Design's definition.
-- later, viewer turns to Terms & Definitions topic, where "Design" is defined, not as a popup, but as normal topic text, always readable.

Same need applies across some 30 terms/definitions.

Question:
Is there a way to make each term's definition draw from a single source... so that I have only one place in which to maintain the definition? (Yes, our definitions change... most of the 30 have been re-written at least once, some 3-5 times).

If I'm reading the pop-up method right, each pop-up draws from a special topic in the Project Explorer Tree, Project Files > Topic Files > Topics (*.xml), where that special topic is designated as a Popup topic class. I am guessing that, by designating the content as a Popup class, runtime code draws from the verbiage and plunks it into whatever technology is making the popup become visible on a mouse click.

(a) Is there a way to make a Popup topic's content NOT behave as a popup in special circumstances (as, when that content is referenced in the Terms and Definitions topic, such that -- rather than being unseen until clicked -- it appears all the time, as with normal text on a WebHelp page)?

If so, that would be a means by which I could maintain each definition only once, in the special Popup class topic. Changes would propagate to the text where the definition DOES appear as a popup as well as propagate to the text where is NOT a popup.

or... if that's not possible...

(b) is there a way to make the both the content of the Popup-type topic and the conventional ("Default" class) Terms & Definitions topic draw from repository-like source or sources -- where I'd need only maintain the repository/repositories?
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Martin Wynne
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Re: Need help noodling 1-stop maintenance for pop-ups & a to

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Hi Dave,

Put the content in a Snippet. Then insert the snippet in the pop-up, and in the "terms" topic.

There is only one Snippet, and you edit it in one place only. Both the pop-up and the "terms" topic change when you do that.

cheers,

Martin.
Dave Gehman
Posts: 575
Joined: Sat Sep 23, 2017 9:05 pm

Re: Need help noodling 1-stop maintenance for pop-ups & a to

Unread post by Dave Gehman »

Martin Wynne wrote: Put the content in a Snippet. Then insert the snippet in the pop-up, and in the "terms" topic.
I was hoping it was as simple as that. Thanks (yet again), Martin. I'll experiment with that method.

Dave
Dave Gehman
Posts: 575
Joined: Sat Sep 23, 2017 9:05 pm

Re: Need help noodling 1-stop maintenance for pop-ups & a to

Unread post by Dave Gehman »

WebHelp output.

OK - I have done as Martin suggested-- that is, I created verbiage in a source file and used it as source for a snippet that whisks that verbiage into both a popup and a conventional WebHelp Terms and Definitions topic.

Key questions:
--Will popups appear in the (local) HTML that is automatically generated for WebHelp as you publish? (This is the HTML that acts as a check URL/file and that appears in my browser, but is not actually drawn from the Internet.)
--Or to make popups happen, do I have to upload the resulting HTML to our external server that contains the WebHelp URL, external, that is, to my computer?
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Martin Wynne
Posts: 2656
Joined: Mon May 12, 2003 3:21 pm
Location: West of the Severn, UK

Re: Need help noodling 1-stop maintenance for pop-ups & a to

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Hi Dave,

There is no need to upload your snippets separately from the topics. H&M will fetch the snippet from the snippets folder on your computer and insert it into the topic when it creates the published topic page. Don't forget to include your snippets folder in the project search path. More about creating and using snippets here:

https://helpandmanual.com/help//index.h ... ippets.htm

cheers,

Martin.
Dave Gehman
Posts: 575
Joined: Sat Sep 23, 2017 9:05 pm

Re: Need help noodling 1-stop maintenance for pop-ups & a to

Unread post by Dave Gehman »

Between the lines, you've probably answered my underlying question. The docs were a little ambiguous as to whether popups could draw their verbiage from another file in the same project, or a file in a separate project.

I'll reconfigure to make the source files external to the main project and see if that solves the issue. The docs do say that the source has to be an H+M XML file... I may just create a separate project to hold the text source material in XML files under that separate project.

Dave
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