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A
Community Expert
AmebrCommunity Expert
Community Expert
November 9, 2015
Question

Multiscreen publishing - parent publishes all children?

  • November 9, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 1243 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How do people manage this so that outdated or draft/test builds aren't pubished?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
Peter GraingeCommunity 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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A
Community Expert
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
Captiv8r
Legend
November 16, 2015

Okay, I have conducted more tests this morning with Republish All unticked.

I set up a simple merge following Peter's webhelp merging guide Merging WebHelp - RoboHelp 9 and 10.

1. Generated the parent.

2. Generated the child.

3. Published the parent. Both parent and child were published.

4. Changed the child and generated only.

5. Published the parent without making any changes to the parent. All changed child files were published. There were no changes to publish from the parent.

This shows that the parent publishes changed child files.

Given this, for my situation, I believe it will be safer to remove the publishing destination from the parent.  This means the Publish button will not be available, so I can't click the button when my brain is in neutral (and mine is regularly. ).


Curiosity question

Did it surprise you that publishing from the parent project would also publish the child files?

If so, why?

Cheers... Rick

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