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Community Expert
November 9, 2015
Question

Multiscreen publishing - parent publishes all children?

  • November 9, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 1247 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How do people manage this so that outdated or draft/test builds aren't pubished?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 16, 2015

I'm not sure what you mean? If I create another destination in the parent, wouldn't that then publish the parent into the child folder instead, then replicate the merge structure within the child?


Hi Amber

It's likely I'm misunderstanding your workflow. So please allow me to try and explain my own understanding and you can tell me if I'm off.

As I understand it, you have multiple authors. In my example, I'll call them A1, A2 and A3. It's my understanding that perhaps A2 and A3 only work on child projects. So if A2 updated the child project and are ready to deploy, they have a publish source defined as only the folder where the child project exists. And when they published, only that folder would be affected because the source for the child project is only that specific folder (and its subfolders).

Cheers... Rick