A Comment About Flare's Dropdown Link Type

On July 23, I wrote a post in the Hyper/Word Services blog on “A Review of MadCap Flare’s Link Types” at http://hyperword.blogspot.com/. This post was repeated in MadCap’s blog at https://www.madcapsoftware.com/blog/2018/08/30/navigation-best-practices-guide-link-types-madcap-flare/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=20180911Newsletter&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=20180911SepMadCapInsider. In the post, I stated in the Dropdown Drawbacks section that there were “None, in my opinion. However, I’d be interested to hear competing opinions.”

In response, Jana Vacková of ABRA Software in Praha (Prague) wrote:

“We might know about one J - so if you are interested in it, here might be one. (I fixed a few spelling and grammatical errors but otherwise left the response as is.)

The opened dropdown menu has problem to flow around the side menu and to use all possible width of the page. Let me elaborate it more:

-         In our project (= ERP SW on line help) we use dropdowns very often – as we found it very cool J for making the long contents more clearly arranged.

-         We use TopNavigation skin with TOC menu at the side of the screen (side menu).

-         When the section (of our help) is complicated (as our SW is really huge, complex and complicated J) the side menu (with TOC) has a lot of items and is “long“.

-         So, if the topic inside in this section has dropdowns on the top (in general placed horizontally in the area where the side menu is) and user clicks on one of these dropdowns, the dropdown opens but the width of its body is limited (thanks to side menu). And is limited up to the end of body content (although the body is much longer than the side menu itself).  When the body itself is long there is a lot of unused space on the screen and user must scroll down more. If there are wide tables with many columns in such dropdown body, there is a problem L.

Have a look below:

I mean the unused area under the side menu:

It could be perfect if the width of dropdown-body could adapt the free space. So, at the bottom of side menu the text would start to flow round.

P.S. We have contacted MC Flare support but they haven’t advised any solution how to adapt this behavior of the width of opened dropdown body in combination with side menu.

Has anyone else encountered this problem and found a solution?