Make Inactive Chapters also Disable their corresponding scenes.

[AlanDunaway]

I'm always frustrated when I disable a chapter(set it to inactive) and it still is exported due to the corresponding scenes being active. I'd like to suggest that, when disabling a chapter, its corresponding scenes should not be exported(should be disabled), since the chapter itself is disabled.
Tried using the export menu, but it's too much of a hassle with multiple chapters.
Is there any chance of getting that one done?

[vkbo]

What do you mean by "export menu"?

You can select a range of items by clicking the first item, and then holding shift and clicking the last item. You can then right click the selection and toggle the active/inactive status of all selected items.

[AlanDunaway]

What do you mean by "export menu"?

You can select a range of items by clicking the first item, and then holding shift and clicking the last item. You can then right click the selection and toggle the active/inactive status of all selected items.

Export menu=Build Window
Also, what you showed works for few scenes. But, if you have lots of scenes(like 30+) per chapter, it ends up becoming a chore.
In the build menu, you can also set scenes/chapter to be active/inactive, but would be nice to have a general toggle, specially if you use touchpad instead of a normal mouse.

[vkbo]

I can change the menu so that it always shows the "Set Active to ..." menu and explicit options. I can then add a version of each that is also recursive. My main concern with such features is that they are quite risky if you click it by mistake and you can't remember what state the sub-elements were in to restore them, so I would like to have a dialog box confirming that you want to overwrite the setting for all items.

Alternatively, I can keep the menu as it is, but if the selected item has child items, ask if it should also apply to them. The dialog would not show up on single items with no child items.

As for having many scenes, that shouldn't really matter since you only have to click the first and last one to select them all. If you expand the chapters you can do the same across multiple chapters.

I'm also wondering what your use case is here. Are you trying to build just one chapter at a time? There is a planned feature for that where you can just right-click any document in the project and build directly. It hasn't been added yet, but it is queued up for the 2.7 release for the moment. It's #1001.

[peter88213]

The problem is that it does not work reciprocally: If the parent is inactive, all children should then logically also be inactive. However, if you make the parent active again, it is not clear whether this should reactivate all the children.
The use case here actually seems clear to me: exclude entire chapters or individual scenes from export and word count. Didn't we have this topic the other day when we were talking about alternatives/variants in the text?

For my application, I have solved it in such a way that all children are deactivated with the parents (in my case this means “unused" type, as with yWriter), but must be explicitly reactivated after the parent is active again (in my case: "normal" type). This can be done with multiple selection.

[vkbo]

The problem is that it does not work reciprocally: If the parent is inactive, all children should then logically also be inactive.

This is not strictly true in the novelWriter case, since the hierarchy is meaningless to novelWriter when the project is parsed. This is stated in the documentation, and has always been like this.

The ability to add scenes under a chapter, or scenes under scenes for that matter as novelWriter doesn't care, is only there for better organisation ... visually. But the chapter header, wherever it may be, is only a marker. All that is needed is adding a chapter doc between two scenes, or simply adding a chapter heading between two scene headings in the same file, and you have a new chapter.

Due to this, disabling a chapter just means that the chapter marker is skipped. Thus the scenes below it (whether they are children or siblings to the chapter doc) just become part of the previous chapter. So the current behaviour is consistent.

The more correct approach is to simply ask the user what their intention is: Do you also want to update the active status of child items? Yes/No.

Didn't we have this topic the other day when we were talking about alternatives/variants in the text?

Depends on the use case. The active/inactive flag is meant as an out-take feature, i.e. discarded scenes, not to continuously filter what is and isn't included in the manuscript. This is precisely why I designed the filter tool in the Manuscript Build Settings in the first place, because people kept using the active/inactive flag for that. It is clunky, and was never intended for this usage.

I know people sometimes want to export chapters. When I was beta reading a friends novel, that's how she sent me the chapters to read. That use case is what #1001 is meant to solve. It is actually a very simple feature to implement, and the build tool already has everything needed to do this. I just need to add the options to click.

The other use case is the variant discussion we had, which is a more advanced use case, but a very interesting one. It can be used to generate different versions of the same manuscript, but it can also be used to generate multiple drafts without removing the old ones, i.e. a sort of version control.

[peter88213]

The problem is that it does not work reciprocally: If the parent is inactive, all children should then logically also be inactive.

This is not strictly true in the novelWriter case, since the hierarchy is meaningless to novelWriter when the project is parsed. This is stated in the documentation, and has always been like this.

The ability to add scenes under a chapter, or scenes under scenes for that matter as novelWriter doesn't care, is only there for better organisation ... visually. But the chapter header, wherever it may be, is only a marker. All that is needed is adding a chapter doc between two scenes, or simply adding a chapter heading between two scene headings in the same file, and you have a new chapter.

Due to this, disabling a chapter just means that the chapter marker is skipped. Thus the scenes below it (whether they are children or siblings to the chapter doc) just become part of the previous chapter. So the current behaviour is consistent.

Even though it may have been clearly communicated, it's not exactly intuitive. In any case, I suspect that this is where the OP's frustration comes from.

[vkbo]

Even though it may have been clearly communicated, it's not exactly intuitive. In any case, I suspect that this is where the OP's frustration comes from.

Possibly. But simply popping the dialog box and ask will solve that part.

But it is still better to implement a feature for the use case that is intended for it, rather than using one that is intended for a different use case and modifying to fit. So it would still be good to get clarification on what the use case is here.

For reference, see #971 which was one of the requests that triggered the whole Build Settings implementation.