[Framers] Conditional Expression build crashing FrameMaker with Internal Errors

[Lin Sims]

This is my first time working with conditional expressions, as opposed to
simple on/off conditions, and it's entirely possible I'm overthinking it.
I've spent some time with grids and a coworker, and I think I've
(hopefully) worked it out. Now to write it up so I don't forget.

The basic issue is that this set of files is generating documents for two
closely related IPs (A and B), and I currently have two audiences for it
(Internal and External), and there may be another audience (Customer1)
being added at some point in the future. Each has their own condition
(currently 4, potentially 5)

Now, I've been trained to put a condition tag on text for each condition
that applies to it, and I think what was happening was that I was getting
confused about what to do in one VERY specific instance: that of the
customer getting SOME but not ALL of the internal information for that IP.
Normally, I'd tag that with Internal and Customer1 and IP (if it happened
to be IP-specific).

What I eventually did was create a clean document with a two-column table.
Each column had the condition names, 1 per row, in both columns. Then in
the right-hand column I applied the same condition. Then I worked out which
information should be visible for each book and added things in and out of
the Condition Expression until only what I wanted to see was visible. Once
I'd done that a couple of times, the others were mostly easy enough to work
out.

Just in case, though, I've copied the expressions into each book's settings
file AND into a OneNote notebook I keep on each project. The expressions
themselves turned out to be a LOT simpler than what I thought I'd need to
get the results I wanted (that overthinking bit again).

Thanks to those who offered suggestions.



On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 11:22 AM, Robert Lauriston <robert at lauriston.com>
wrote:

> The standard approach is to have tags InternalOnly and ExternalOnly.
> If you want something to appear in both, you use neither tag.
>
> On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 8:10 AM, Lin Sims <ljsims.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Whoops. I take back that last. If I have something tagged as
> >
> > A + Internal + External
> >
> > and I want it to show in the A+External book, the expression
> >
> > "A" and not ("B" or "Internal")
> >
> > hides it.
>



-- 
Lin Sims