HTML Help Builder
Different "views" in a help file
Gravatar is a globally recognized avatar based on your email address. Different "views" in a help file
  Apr 17, 2019 @ 01:10pm

Hey Rick - thanks for the call today. Forgot to ask you a question.

When people log into our system, they are either clients or attorneys. They have very different functionality in the system (some shared things, but not a ton). Is it better to have one project and somehow filter the topics based on logon, or have two projects and duplicate the similar functionality topics?

I'm assuming two projects (and direct the help link to a different folder based on group) - but then what's the best way to handle shared topics (and future changes to them)? Any thoughts?


Gravatar is a globally recognized avatar based on your email address. re: Different "views" in a help file
  Rick Strahl
  Apr 17, 2019 @ 02:18pm

There's no built-in way to do this in Help Builder, but you can filter topics when you build the project. So you can have subtrees that get output only for a certain project, and others that are output for another project. That lets you work with a single project, but output to two different 'Web sites'.

Other than that there's no provision built in because the help content is basically completely static meaning there's no runtime logic that can be applied to decide which topics to show. Once generated - that's pretty much it.

Markus and I are working on a different documentation solution (still under development) that's much more dynamic and allows for things like that where you can essentially provide a help collection. I'm hoping to get more time on that soon and it will support importing existing Help Builder content. This solution uses Markdown and files in Git (among other things) to manage content and Markdown Monster (or any other editor) for editing features.

Files are just markdown with a driving index that holds topic metadata (or the data can be stored right in the document as YAML).

Unfortunately both of us are very busy, so this is a side project but we're both using it for a number of documentation projects now. It's a hosted solution but it works bascically off any Git repository, TFS, DropBox and a number of other stores.

Just FYI 😃

+++ Rick ---

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