Responsive layouts were introduced in RoboHelp 11 to allow your content to be viewed with ease on desktops, tablets and smartphones. The appearance adapts to suit the device, RoboHelp takes care of that. Now Adobe RoboHelp (2015 release) adds new layouts with something extra for your end-users, dynamic content filtering.
You provide the filter options to suit the requirement, be that geographical regions, trade specialization, equipment type and so on.
The end-user chooses what they want to see rather than having to wade through everything you have provided.
You can set this up so that the user can select just one of the options or so that they can multi-pick.
If you have used Content Categories (Dynamic User-Centric Content) in an earlier version of RoboHelp you will welcome the greater options Dynamic Content Filtering brings, so will your end-users. There are some differences in the setup and these are described below.
To set up the content to work with Dynamic Content Filtering, you need to be familiar with the use of conditional build tags (CBTs) and build expressions. A CBT is applied to some text or an image or any part of the topic content so that you can create simple or complex build expressions to exclude or include that content when you generate an output.
Dynamic Content Filtering allows you to use the CBTs and / or build expressions so that the end-user can choose what they want to see.
In Employee Care we want end-users to see content according to where they are based. This is shown in this table.
The first thing we need to do is exclude from the output any content that we do not want the end-users to see, no matter how they apply the filters that we make available. That is done in the Content configuration where you can see that we do not want any topics or content that has an eBookOnly, Print or AuthorContent tag applied.
The Conditional Build Expression below excludes them from the output so we do not need to worry about them when we apply the filtering options.
With the required content in the output, we now need to set up how it can be filtered. To do this the Use Dynamic Content Filter check-box is selected and the Customize button is then clicked.
Clicking Customize displays this dialog.
Icon 1 allows us to set up groups, in this example we only want one, Country.
Icon 2 displays the Tags and Expressions dialog that allows us to set up the options within that group.
In this project we want to set up US, Canada and UK as the filtering options. As shown below, the dialog initially shows all the tags and expressions that have been set up in the project. In RoboHelp (2015 release) expressions can be named making it much easier to deal with those complex expressions where you had to stop and work out what each one did.
The expression shown below is to keep certain content from this output and that was selected in the Content Settings dialog above. Here we want to create the filter options so we select Canada, UK and US.
The title can be whatever you want so here we have used it to provide an instruction to end-users.
As we only want end-users to select one country at a time, we leave the Allow Multiple Selection option unticked.
The end result in the Dynamic Content Filter dialog will be as in the image below. By default RoboHelp will display the options selected in alphabetical order, here we have used the arrow keys to change the order and we have used a context menu to make US the default.
When the end-user accesses the output they can click the filter icon and select from the options you have provided. In a different project you might want to provide further groups such as Region and so on.
If you want to see a more sophisticated example of Dynamic Content Filtering, see the Travel the Whirls sample project.
If you have previously used Content Categories in WebHelp and now want to use Dynamic Content Filtering with a responsive layout in the same project, there are some considerations.
If you used a single TOC or Index with tags applied, you will be able to use that with Dynamic Content Filtering. If you used a different TOC or Index for each category, you will need to change to using a single TOC or Index with CBTs applied, as in this sample project.
You can only use one glossary and it is not possible to apply CBTs to it.
If you used variables only to allow quick
name changes so that each variable only had one value, that will work
with Dynamic Content Filtering. If you used variables so that each
instance could have a different value in different outputs, then you
will need to make some changes.
In this project there are outputs that require selection of a particular
variable set - for example in the Printed Outputs the US, Canada and
UK sets are required. For that reason a new Dynamic Content Filtering
set has been created for this project. To deal with the variables
where different values are required according the filtering option,
you will see that each value has been entered with a conditional build
tag applied.
The responsive layouts that shipped with RoboHelp 11 will not support Dynamic Content Filtering. You will need to change to one of the RoboHelp (2015 release) layouts.