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Community Expert
November 9, 2015
Question

Multiscreen publishing - parent publishes all children?

  • November 9, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 1249 views

Hi all,

Just setting up merging in Multiscreen HTML5 output. It appears that publishing the parent publishes all the children that might exist in the "mergedProjects" folder. This is pretty undesirable behaviour when different people are working on each of the children and with different publishing schedules.

How do people manage this so that outdated or draft/test builds aren't pubished?

And does anyone know if this is the same for Responsive HTML5? Would we need to publish the parent and children all at the same time every time (given the children have to be generated into the parent build - or is that only the first time)?

Regards,

Amber

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1 reply

Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 12, 2015

It often happens the first time you generate the merge and I have never understood why that should be. I think you will find that whenever you generate the parent again, it will not happen.

No guarantees. It is best to generate somewhere and then publish. If it should generate all, you simply don't publish as well.


See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

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AmebrCommunity ExpertAuthor
Community Expert
November 13, 2015

Thanks Peter.

I realised I have Republish All ticked in the parent which forces everything to be republished all the time. When this setting is unticked, then RH only publishes stuff it thinks is different, including stuff in the mergedProjects. How it determines that I'm not sure.

To be safe, I think I'll remove the publish destination from the parent, and manually copy the output across to the server when needed - theoretically the parent shouldn't have to change very often.

Thanks again,

Amber

Captiv8r
Legend
November 14, 2015

So when did making sense come into it? I agree that what Amber says makes sense. I have have one teensy weensy issue with it, reality. I have had merges that quite happily only generate what you want, the parent alone and then any one or all of the children. Then suddenly one day you generate the parent without changing the Republish All setting and this time it generates all. Repeat the process and it generates just the parent.

I stand by what I said, generate and publish so that if it decides to generate all, you have the option of not publishing as well to preserve that. Republish All is a bit misleading. I'm pretty sure it applies to the generation as well. I do know for sure that it can generate all when previously it has just generated the parent.

Why? I'm not high enough up the pay grade to be told that.

Peter Grainge

www.grainge.org


Hmmm, I thought the only issue was publishing. Perhaps I should carefully re-read the thread? I've never seen the process of generating actually generate the child projects as well. How would that happen? Does it launch another instance of RoboHelp and generate the children?

I'm confused.

Cheers... Rick