Occasionally it may be needed to access data from descendant notes that are descended via notes that don't export. The latter might exist only as internal structuring of the internal document outline. Consider this layout:
2015 Articles
January
Article A
Article B
February
Article C
Article D
You might want the 2015 articles pages to list all articles with month heading but don't need any per-month pages. Thus the root note might export:
Traversing non-exporting notes
The latter template might have code like:
Traversing non-exporting notes
As per-month pages are not needed, it might seem logical to set $HTMLDontExport to true for the month containers. However, that means the 'month' template above is never evaluated and so the main note is missing some data. Conversely, leaving the export on generates unwanted pages for the month container notes
The secret here is to let the per-month container notes still export but to use a blank template, i.e. a template with no code or even HTML comments, i.e. no $Text at all. As Tinderbox will not generate an empty file, no HTML exported file is emitted during export but the above templates can still work.
This scenario is an edge case that shows the flexibility offered by Tinderbox's export methods.