As you create documents, you can also link them together to form a basic content outline. For example, you might start with a module document and link several sections to it. Then, for each section, you can link one or more topics that demonstrate how to perform a series of specific tasks or transactions in an application. This is just one example of how you could link and structure content, but you have the flexibility to design it in many ways to meet your needs. For example, you could also start with a section document and link topics or other module documents to it.
As you build an outline for your content, you may also want to supplement it with conceptual information in the form of web page or package links. For example, any module/section or topic can have a link that appears as conceptual or introductory information for the document. This link can be a specific page of a web site on the Internet, a custom web page that you create within the Developer, a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, Microsoft Word document, Flash movie, and so on. Your users can view this content from the Player once you publish the content. These are just two examples of how you can build content by creating and linking documents.
At any time you can review the links that a document contains by displaying the Related Documents toolpane or by adding the Link count or Links to property columns to the Library.
Related Document Definition by Operation
As you begin to work with the Developer, you will notice that there are many document functions that consider the inclusion of related documents such as delete and export (as well as check in/out and restore in a multi-user environment). Based on the function that you perform, different related documents are considered. For example, when you delete a module, you can also request to delete its related sections and topics. However, the module is also linked to a template and deleting a template does not make sense since a template is usually linked to many different documents in the Library. Therefore, when you delete a document and choose to include related documents, linked templates are not considered.
When you perform an operation that can impact related documents, you see a prompt asking whether you want to include the related documents as well as a View related documents hyperlink to display a list of related documents.
Note: Regardless of whether a document is included as a related document, it can always be explicitly selected, thus ensuring that it is included in the operation.