Using Conditions to Unbind Links

In addition to applying condition tags to various content in your project, you may want to use them to unbind links from print-based output, displaying the text only.

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.

How to Use a Condition to Unbind a Link

  1. 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 (or one that already has a condition). You can also click tags in the info bar to select certain blocks of content (see Clickable Tags).

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

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

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

  8. In the Exclude Action section, select Unbind.

    In other words, you are telling Central this: Keep the hyperlink in the targets that are associated with the tags that I selected. For the targets not associated with those tags, get rid of the hyperlink, but do not remove the text.

    On the other hand, if you had selected the "Remove" option, you would have been telling Central this: Keep the hyperlink in the targets that are associated with the tags that I selected. For the targets not associated with those tags, remove both the hyperlink and the text.

  9. Click Apply.