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Use variables and metadata in Author-it. Once you are familiar with creating and reusing
content, you can take that content even further by applying some conditionality to it.
Our most popular conditionality feature is called variables.
A variable is a placeholder for repeated, changeable text. Variables are used within
your content to switch out pieces of content that change based on the context of the document.
Using variables in this manner makes content reusable across multiple contexts and prevents
you from having to duplicate content when only some text or graphics are different.
Another conditionality feature is metadata. Metadata is a way to tag your content with
more information. Common uses are to make it more searchable or embed information used
in other systems. The metadata tag is used to assign the value to your content. And both
the metadata tag and the value are searchable and can be used to filter content out of your
book. Let’s take a look at using variables now.
We recently imported the Acme Teleportation Product Manual into Author-it, created some
new content and reused some existing content. We want to apply some conditionality to our
content so that it is reusable across multiple contexts and uses. We will replace the Acme
Teleportation company name with a company name variable so that we can produce our manuals
under multiple manufacturer names. And, we will also assign an effective date to our
topics using a metadata tag. We can replace the company name, Acme Teleportation,
with a variable several ways. In the first way, we can simply type the variable value
in. The variable name is always in between open and close carats. Another way is to insert
the variable from the ribbon toolbar. We can even use Find and Replace to search all of
our content for Acme Teleportation and replace it with the variable. Let's change the name
of the document as well and we'll synchronize all of our headings for our outputs when we
publish. Now that we’ve inserted the variable as
our placeholder, let’s assign the value we want when we publish. The easiest way to
manage variable assignments is to assign the variable value to the book. This way, all
topics that contain the variable within the book will use the book's value.
Now, we want to use variables in another way--to add some more information to our topics. This
is often referred to as metadata, and metadata is useful for filtering and searching. We
will assign the metadata tag and a value to some topics. We can then search on the metadata
tag, we can search on the metadata value, or we can search on both and you are able
to see which components it is tagged to. If you are looking to learn more, visit the
Author-it Community, our Learning Center, our Knowledge Center, or the Developer Community.