How to share conditional build expressions across projects

[sjb2016capita]

Hi,

I've managed to get dynamic filters to work as expected on one of my test projects. To get things to work though, I had to create conditional build expressions and use those in dynamic content filter dialog. This was because even though using a standard conditional build tag worked, only the CBEs were being selected automatically in the final merged project. Maybe thats  bug, but it's working now anyway.

So, is there a way to share my CBEs between projects. We're a team with access to TFS as source control if that helps. The CBEs are relatively simple, but doing it across 25 or 30 projects per release seems tedious and even more worrying, error prone.

Can I easily share these's CBEs among projects? I'm not afraid of writing a little script to insert some XML into a specific project file if that is an option. Any help, much appreciated.

UPDATE:

I found where the tags and expressions are stored (rhbuildtag.apj), and I was able to copy that file to another project with no problem. However, I still had to recreate the settings in the Dynamic Content Filter dialog. Most of our output will be merged into one project and even if it isn't merged, will not need to look any different, so I can just copy the whole output from project to project?

Message was edited by: Samuel Brown - Expanded the question to encompass outputs in general

[sjb2016capita]

So, I managed to find a solution to this problem with the help of another post here on the forums. Basically, make the rhbuildtag.apj file a baggage file and add it to the resource manager. Thanks @Captiv8r Seems to work fine. The only thing I'd add, if you're new to RoboHelp, is that to actually get the baggage file into a project, I had to drag it from the resource manager into a topic, which then added it to the baggage file list in the project manager. I then deleted the inserted text in the topic, but the file remains in the project manager and has the standard syncing options for a shared resource.

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1682088

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

I'm a bit confused by your answer here. And it makes me wonder if you may encounter issues down the road. Here's why.

The Baggage Files feature is normally used to include content that "goes along for the ride" into the output. For example, perhaps you want to make a PDF document available for download.

The rhbuildtag.apj file you mention is actually a "project" file and to my knowledge doesn't normally exist among the output files.

While this arrangement may do the trick, I'm going to advise you to watch it with a careful eye. It could be that you will never see an issue. But it is certainly a suspect if things begin to get wonky.

Cheers... Rick

[sjb2016capita]

Well, I understand what you're saying but unless I'm misunderstanding things, that just what you advised another user to do on the thread linked above  

If this isn't an officially supported method of sharing project level files, I guess I'm concerned about RoboHelp in general (we're trying to decide between RoboHelp and Flare at the moment). We're a small team but will be working across many projects, so being able to easily share variables and other project level files will be important for us. Are you aware of an "official" way of sharing project files?

Thanks for all your help!

[Captiv8r]

Ahhh, and so I did. Interesting.

I think I need more coffee!

[Peter Grainge]

Going back to your original post, you are talking about merging outputs so that they appear as one to the use, if I understand correctly.

I believe that merged help is much easier to produce using RoboHelp compared with Flare. The reason is that it is much easier to set up cross project links in RoboHelp. The reason being it can be done via dialogs whereas in Flare I believe it has to be done by working out manually the relative path in the output and typing that in. Plenty of scope for error. That was the case last time I looked at Flare but it could have changed. There is a complete tutorial for the RoboHelp method on my site.

Regarding the rhbuildtag.apj file, if you right-click an item in resource manager there is an option to Copy to Project File. It will of course whinge that there is already such a file but you can click Yes to overwrite that.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge

[sjb2016capita]

Thanks Peter. Your point about Flare is a good one. As far as I can tell, it is still a manual process in the latest release of Flare as well. Their preferred solution seems to be to put content that should be linked to in a common project which, when the content is updated there, is imported afresh into the other projects. However, that isn't really a link to another project, it's just including the content in each project which isn't ideal or necessary.

In regards to the copy to project, that does work. And really it's no different than going into each project and clicking the sync button, but for my own edification, do you think the alternative baggage file method is likely to blow up in my face or would you expect either method to work consistently.

[prhmusic2]

"Their preferred solution seems to be to put content that should be linked to in a common project which, when the content is updated there, is imported afresh into the other projects. However, that isn't really a link to another project, it's just including the content in each project which isn't ideal or necessary."

Throwing another tool in the mix, this is exactly how I would have handled your situation when I used Confluence for documentation. We had an "includes" site and created pages for graphics and pages for text that were going to be used throughout the doc set and then inserted references to those pages. It worked swimmingly!