[Framers] Conditional Expression build crashing FrameMaker with Internal Errors

[Lin Sims]

Internal is (sometimes) being combined with tags that specify the IP. For
example, in the Only We Get to Look At It version of the book for IP A,
there will be information that is specific to IP A that is not supposed to
be visible to external customers, and we don't want to provide any IP B
information in the book because, while they are similar, they aren't the
same and the internal customers don't want to see it.

One of the "rules" I learned somewhere was to either have all your
conditions say what the text is IN, or have them all say what the text is
NOT in, because (I was told) it could get confusing if some conditions were
for when you did want text and others where for when you didn't want it.  I
generally pick what I want the text to be in.

So my environment at the moment has two separate IPs, and two (or maybe 3)
separate audiences, so that was how I defined my conditions (plus the two
spare that are only seen in review drafts).

People inside the company get to see everything for a particular IP, so
their book has generic plus internal information for the IP plus the one
special customer's information for the IP.

People outside the company (who aren't the specific customer) get to see
the generic information for the IP.

People who work for that one special customer get to see the generic
information for the IP plus the customer-specific information for the IP
but NOT the internal information for the IP.

I had considered doing separate tags for each combination, but I could see
the number of possible combinations getting wildly out of hand.

There's the additional issue that I while I usually know which IP the
information is for (if it isn't generic), I don't always know who the
audience is. It can change. The IP has been known to change. ("Oh, we said
it was IP A and everyone could see it? Sorry, it's actually for both IP A
and IP B, but only we and Cust01 get to see it.")

Robert's "not" suggestion seems to be working correctly to generate the 6
books I believe I'll need, but I will probably do some more testing to be
sure, since I don't entirely understand how Frame is handling conditions. I
honestly thought I had to explicitly state all the combinations I did want
and all the ones I didn't want (hence the crashes and the plea for help).

Again, thanks to all (and particularly Robert) for all the help.

Time to go home.


On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 5:02 PM, Robert Lauriston <robert at lauriston.com>
wrote:

> Generally speaking, when defining a set of conditions, you want to (1)
> minimize the amount of text that has to be tagged, (2) minimize
> multiple tagging, (3) maximize unconditional text, and (4) define the
> minimum number of conditions to achieve that.
>
> Sometimes that means defining conditions for text to be included,
> other times it means defining conditions for text to be excluded. Best
> practice, those should be named so as to indicate their function, for
> example IncludeInFoo, OnlyInFoo, and ExcludeFromFoo.
>
> I'm not sure why an Internal tag would ever be combined with any other
> tag. External should be unnecessary since it means the same thing as
> the absence of the Internal tag.
>
> On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 1:21 PM, Lin Sims <ljsims.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Yours is a more elegant solution. As I said before, this is my first
> > go-around with Conditional expressions. It didn't help at all that the
> > standard I was told to apply here was to tag text with the condition for
> the
> > book I want to produce. That produced some odd results I can no longer
> > recall (mostly because I had text tagged for both Internal and Cust01).
> >
> > What I wound up with, in variations, is as follows:
> >
> > For a book where I want IP A and Cust01, but not IP B or Internal, I
> used:
> >
> > "IP A" or "Cust01" and not ("IP B" or ("IP A" and "Internal"))
> >
> > It works.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 3:35 PM, Robert Lauriston <robert at lauriston.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> ("A" or "External" or ("A" and "External")) could be simplified to
> >>
> >> ("A" or "External")
> >>
> >> not (("A" and "Internal") or "B" or ("B" and "External") or "TBP or
> >> "WriterNote")
> >>
> >> could be simplified to
> >>
> >> not ("A" and "Internal") or "B"  or "TBP or "WriterNote")
> >>
> >> But it's not clear why you can't just use
> >>
> >> not ("Internal" or "B"  or "TBP or "WriterNote")
> >> _______________________________________________
> >>
> >> This message is from the Framers mailing list
> >>
> >> Send messages to framers at lists.frameusers.com
> >> Visit the list's homepage at  http://www.frameusers.com
> >> Archives located at
> >> http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/
> >> Subscribe and unsubscribe at
> >> http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com
> >> Send administrative questions to listadmin at frameusers.com
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Lin Sims
>



-- 
Lin Sims