Adding Conditions to Microcontent in MadCap Flare 2020

Mad­Cap Flare 2020 adds improve­ments to its micro­con­tent fea­ture by sup­port­ing conditions.

In this blog post, I delve into the enhance­ments and pro­vide step-by-step instruc­tions on how you can mar­ry micro­con­tent with con­di­tions. Flare recent­ly cre­at­ed a post on some of the micro­con­tent improve­ments in the lat­est release of the soft­ware; this blog pro­vides addi­tion­al details.

What is microcontent?

Accord­ing to Flare’s online help, “Micro con­tent is short, con­cise infor­ma­tion that stands alone and is eas­i­ly con­sum­able.” Com­mon ways to use micro­con­tent in Flare include build­ing FAQs, work­ing with chat­bots, and adding micro­con­tent to search results. In this blog post, I explain how to add micro­con­tent in Mad­Cap Flare 2020 to your online help search results.

What does microcontent look like?

If you search for cer­tain terms, such as “con­di­tions” in Mad­Cap Flare’s online help, you see exam­ples of microcontent.

For years, Google has used the same par­a­digm. For exam­ple, type “how to pow­er wash” (I just bought a pow­er wash­er) and the search engine dis­plays a sum­ma­ry of the steps with­out me even hav­ing to click a website.

Add microcontent in Flare

First, I draft­ed a top­ic called “Adding Vari­ables” that includes five steps and two screen cap­tures. I con­di­tion­al­ized the images so they only appear in the topic.

I con­di­tion­al­ized the images with the Top­i­cOn­ly tag (I assume that you know how to con­di­tion­al­ize con­tent in Flare). This top­ic serves as the mas­ter for the microcontent.

To re-use the top­ic as microcontent:

1. In Flare, click the Con­tent Explorer.
2. Under Resources, click Micro­Con­tent.
3. Right-click the Micro­Con­tent fold­er and select New > Micro Con­tent.
4. In the Add File dia­log box, type a new name for your micro­con­tent in the File Name field and click Add.
   
5. In the Micro­con­tent edi­tor, click the Add a phrase icon.
   
6. Type a phrase for the micro­con­tent, such as “Vari­ables.” Phras­es are the key­words that you think users will type in the help’s search field when look­ing for a cer­tain topic.
7. Option­al­ly, you can type alter­nate phras­es for the top­ic (for exam­ple, “Adding Vari­ables,” “Using Vari­ables,” and so on).
8. Right-click the phrase(s) and select Add Link.
   
9. In the Select File dia­log box, link the phrase to a top­ic (I linked my phrase to the Adding Vari­ables top­ic that I recent­ly cre­at­ed) and click OK.
10. Right-click the phrase you added and select Prop­er­ties.
11. Click Micro Con­tent Con­di­tions.
12. In the list of Tags, select Default.TopicOnly and click Exclude. This step excludes the images that I added in the orig­i­nal help top­ic so they do not appear in the microcontent.
    
13. Save your project.
14. Gen­er­ate your help.

View the search results with microcontent

When users type the phrase “Vari­ables” in the search field, they see micro­con­tent that is based on the top­ic but does not dis­play any images as we con­di­tion­al­ized them to not dis­play. We are try­ing to just dis­play crit­i­cal con­tent in a con­cise way. Here’s an example:

Of course, the full top­ic is also avail­able in the help includ­ing the images.

Why is this a welcome improvement?

This enhance­ment is a worth­while devel­op­ment as you can re-use exist­ing top­ics and opti­mize the con­tent so it’s ide­al­ly suit­ed for micro­con­tent. For depart­ments who are already using micro­con­tent, this fea­ture is a wel­come addition.