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How do people manage this so that outdated or draft/test builds aren't pubished?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

Not if you assume a single author and a single deployment date. But I've always worked in situations with multiple authors and multiple deployment dates. Possibly 'frustrated' would be a more accurate description.

For example, C1 is released on Mondays by A1, C2 on Fridays by A2, C3 every second month by A2. Then the parent may need to be updated by A1 when a new product is brought on board. A1 risks accidentally releasing incomplete help for C1 if they have generated it since last time they published (highly likely); or C2 or C3 if they have generated those to check something - with the added bonus of potentially having generated an old version because they didn't get the latest (because they were just quickly checking something).


In that case what I would recommend is to create a second publishing destination that points only to the specific child folder location. If this were configured, only that specific child should be published.

Cheers... Rick

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