RoboHelp 2020 - Need help breaking out large project into 4 separate projects (Broken Links)

[ChelseaCifuentes]

I work for a public sector software company, and I'm currently in the process of breaking out one large project (which combines all of our tax products in one help center) into 4 separate projects (one for each product).

My first step was to create a new project and import all the necessary topics and images from the old, large project. I also copied over the CSS files and masterpage. The issue is all images and topic connections are now "broken links." Is there a way around this? Fixing all of the broken links could take several months and seems impossible. Does anyone have any advice or ways around this?

Thank you!

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Maybe it would be faster to make 4 copies of the original large project & then throw away anything that didn't belong in the first to Product 1? As long as you've maintained the relative structure between topics and the images, you shouldn't have any proken links in the copies.

[ChelseaCifuentes]

Thank you, Jeff! That didn't even cross my mind. I'm going to try that and report back.

[Peter Grainge]

Are there specific reasons for having separate projects rather than one project and four outputs?

There would still be work required to avoid links between products as that is what is giving you the broken links when you split the projects by whatever method you use.

The advantage of keeping one project is common topics. You can work around that by having one project for those and linking to those topics but overall if one project can achieve what you want, it has advantages. Hence asking the reason.

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[ChelseaCifuentes]

Hi Peter,

The reason IT wants them separated is because we are building a new customer support portal, where customers should only be able to see content specific to the products they have. If we leave the large project as it is now, customers will see other tax product information they don't need.

When I tried breaking each product out into separate projects, the name of the project changed, therefore the file location names for images/topics also changed. So I assumed that was the reason for the broken links.

I planned to try Jeff's idea today, but now I'm wondering if I will have the same problem as before since the project name (and file location names) will still change anyway.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

I think if you keep all the files in the same relative position to each other, and rename the project inside RH, you should keep your links intact.

[Peter Grainge]

The reason IT wants them separated is because we are building a new customer support portal, where customers should only be able to see content specific to the products they have. If we leave the large project as it is now, customers will see other tax product information they don't need.

So IT need four separate outputs so you create four TOCs and four presets. That will be what they need. As before, the key to it working is not having links in topics used in one preset that go to topics that will not be in that output. Where necessary Variables can be used for to get different strings in different outputs. You would create say ProdName with a value of Product A and then use Variable Sets to say that in another output the string should be Product B. It's explained in the About RoboHelp sample project and on my site.

That's the way I would be going. Otherwise any common topics have to be duplicated or linked from yet another project. Having it all in one place is much better. It's what Single Sourcing is all about. One source project, many outputs.

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[ChelseaCifuentes]

Thank you, Peter. That makes sense. Is this the page you're referring to? https://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/rh_tour/rh2020/single_sourcing/single_sourcing.htm

[Peter Grainge]

That outlines how it works. After you generate I suggest you try some sort of link checker such as Xenu to check none of the links in each output are broken. It hasn't got the best UI but it's free and it works.

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