RH 2022 - Renaming multiple files

[Andrea@AgileDocs]

Longshot question, but is there an easy way to rename multiple files names (not topic names) in bulk without breaking links? I'm using RH 2022.0.346

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

In short the answer is no. RoboHelp doesn't have that option for multiple files, only one file at a time works.

Third party apps will do it and break your links. The calculation is whether it is quicker to use an app and fix the links than doing it one at a time and letting RoboHelp do it. 

I think I would copy the project, try the bulk rename and then look at the broken links report.

________________________________________________________

My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

[Andrea@AgileDocs]

Thank you! I was afraid you would say that, but hopeful that there might some workarounds. I have about 1000 files to rename, but my organization will not allow me to use 3rd party tools for security reasons. I guess I'll keep plugging away one by one. 🙂

[prhmusic2]

Did you find a way to do this? One thing you *could* do would be to use DOS commands - not a 3rd party tool, it is part of Windows - to create a bunch of "REN" commands. The basic command is as follows:
ren "oldfilename.html" "newfilename.html"
Just throwing that out there as an idea to avoid manually renaming 1000 files...

[Peter Grainge]

Wouldn't you have to name those 1000 files with both the old and new name? I'm not seeing how it makes the task easier.

Also then the case of the links could be out of sync unless you rename to lowercase and use that option in the output. If merged help is involved it would cause further issues.

________________________________________________________

My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

[Amebr · Accepted solution]

One thing Robohelp can do is find and replace. So if the change is consistent for all the files - say, renaming MyProduct to NewCoolApp - then you could do a find and replace in the source code. You'd probably need a little a bit of regex (regular expression - kind of a fancy search with advanced wildcards) so you only changed the text inside links, but a developer should be able to help you write it. (Or maybe you definitely want every instance of the text changed, in which case you probably wouldn't need any regex.) Test on a copy of your project first to make sure it doesn't break anything in your real project. Once done you'd check for any further links that the search and replace didn't catch (e.g. toc entries, perhaps)

Or.

How about some quick maths as justification for a new tool your managers. Do a few files and time how long it takes. Multiply by the number of files for the estimated total time to make the changes.

Assuming you're making the same change to all file names (e.g. replacing a product name for example) then divide by 2. This is the estimated time to fix just the broken links in Robohelp, as the third party tool will do the rename in only a few seconds and for simplicity we'll say renaming takes the same time as fixing the broken links. (You could time each component more accurately if you wanted to, or say that renaming is 1/3 of the time, if that is your estimate of the effort required, but for simplicity I'm just going with 50%.)

Then you can do some more maths to estimate the cost to the business. Convert the estimated time to hours, then multiply by your cost per hour. Do for both the manual and automated estimates. Money can sometimes do wonders for software approvals 🙂