When working with variants, the following validation rules apply.
Object validation rules
- Variants created from the same primary object must have unique criteria values assigned - you cannot create two variants and assign the same criteria values to both.
- You cannot create a variant of a Publishing Profile object.
Primary objects cannot be deleted if they have any variants. You must either delete the variants if they are no longer needed, or remove the link between the variant and the parent. Once you have removed all of the links, delete the primary object.
- Duplicating a primary object only duplicates the primary object - it does not duplicate any of the object's variants.
- All variant criteria must be resolved before publishing - if variant objects matching the criteria cannot be found then the parent object is used. If the selected criteria causes a conflict then the conflict is resolved using the criteria's priority rating.
- Variant objects are stored in the same folder as their primary objects.
- Use both primary and variant objects to create relationships by dragging to create the relationship.
However, when you view the relationship you'll always see the primary object. For example, if you open a hyperlink object and view the Hypertext Links tab, you'll see the primary topic and not the variant topic. This is because the relationship between objects is stored against the primary object. During publishing the filter selections define how the relationship to the variant is resolved for the output.
- You can drag a primary or variant topic from the Library Explorer object list into a book's Table of Contents pane.
- If no filtering has been applied to the book, the primary object is shown.
- If filtering has been applied to the book, but there is no matching variant, the primary object is shown.
- If filtering has been applied to the book, and there is a matching variant, the matching variant is shown.