Applying and Removing Conditions

A condition is a single-sourcing feature that you can apply to files or different areas of your content. Conditions can determine whether certain information displays in some outputs but not in others. You can also control whether content displays on a certain device or screen size.

After you create condition tags in a Flare project, you can apply them to your content. You can also remove a condition from content.

Permission Required?

Authoring is available to users with the Author status. By default, users with Author status have the following permissions set:

  • If this is deselected, then viewing files in a read-only mode is allowed. On the left side of the page, the Files vertical three-dot menu is not available.

  • If this is deselected, the XHTML in the Code view is read-only.

    Editing code is regarded as a capability for an advanced user. If not done properly, the code can become malformed quickly. Administrators can prevent users from editing the code by deselecting the Edit Code permission.

For more information about permissions, see Setting User Permissions or Setting Team Permissions.

How to Apply a Condition to Content

  1. In Central open a project, and select the Files tab at the top.

  2. On the left, navigate to a topic or snippet file. The file contents display on the right.

  3. In the upper-right of the Content Editor, click Edit.

  4. In the Content Editor, highlight or select the content to which you want to apply a condition. You can also click tags in the info bar to select certain blocks of content (see Clickable Tags in the Info Bar).

  5. From the Content Editor's local toolbar, click .

  6. On the left, select the appropriate condition set.

  7. On the right, select the condition you want to apply.

  8. (Optional) If you are applying a condition to a link, you have access to a couple of other Exclude Action options.

    • Remove Deletes the link text from the output. This is the default and most commonly selected option.

    • Unbind Removes the link from the content in the output, but leaves the text.

      Example You are creating both online and PDF output from your project. You might have some content where you have inserted hyperlinks, and you want this content to be included in both the online and PDF output. However, let's say that a particular hyperlink connects to another topic that you are not including in the PDF. When you generate the online output, everything is fine. But when you generate the PDF, an error is displayed in the log because the compiler cannot find the topic referenced in the hyperlink.

      The way to avoid seeing the error (and to avoid users experiencing a broken link in the output) is to apply a condition tag (e.g., "OnlineOnly") to the hyperlink and select the option in the dialog to unbind the link. If you then exclude that condition tag from your print target, you will still see the hyperlink text in the PDF, but the link will be removed. Therefore, you will no longer receive an error and the link will not be broken.

  9. Click Apply.

If the animation below is cut off, you can see the complete animation by clicking the link under it to open the full topic.

How to Remove a Condition From Content

  1. In Central open a project, and select the Files tab at the top.

  2. On the left, navigate to a topic or snippet file. The file contents display on the right.

  3. In the upper-right of the Content Editor, click Edit.

  4. In the Content Editor, highlight or select the content to which a condition has been applied. You can also click tags in the info bar to select certain blocks of content (see Clickable Tags in the Info Bar).

  5. From the Content Editor's local toolbar, click .

  6. On the left, select the appropriate condition set.

  7. On the right, select the condition you want to unbind from that content, removing the check mark.

  8. Click Apply.

What’s Noteworthy?

Note You can tell whether certain content has one or more condition tags applied to it by clicking in the toolbar. See Showing or Hiding Applied Conditions.

Note Applying conditions is available only for authors, and only in the Content Editor accessed from the project's Files page (see Authoring and Files). It is not available in the editor that is used for topic reviews.

Note For more information about conditions, see the Flare online Help.