The HelpServer topics are organized around a single subject. Now imagine that your topics contain distinct kinds information such as a general description, technical specifications, a syntax, a check list, etc... You could command your authors to provide all this kind of information in the body of a topic and hope that they will do this consistently. A nicer approach however, would be to split a topic into fragments that identifies the kind of information. And this is where the HelpServer 'Chunk classes' come in. By defining chunk classes you provide a list of the information types that assist authors in building topics in a consistent manner. The typical behaviour of a chunk is
• | It relates to the entire topic, in other words, a chunk is organized around a single topic. |
• | It cannot be shared or hyperlinked. |
• | It can have a title (which is the chunk class description) but the chunk title is never reflected in the tree or in the table of contents. |
• | It can have its own security property. |
• | It can be further split up into multiple conditional chunks. |
Consider the usage of chunks with care and only use it to distinguish the kinds of information in a topic. With a limited number of chunks in a topic you can provide a usable starter set that can be adopted for immediate authoring.