Merging RH7 projects

[771Y]

I currently have 12 individual projects which each hold several duplicate topics. There are in total 420 .chm files spread into these projects. This was due to the restriction of the number of build tags in RHX5. One of the projects has menu pages which links to all of these .chm files.

Now that i have RH7 and source control it looks like it will be easier to have one large project for myself and 4 other authors to update from, rather than the current 12 projects (which are currently stored on 4 separate hard drives).

Is there anyway of merging all of these projects into one (all i can find is merging projects on the TOC, which isn't what i'm looking for)?

Hope you can help?!!!

[Peter Grainge]

Import all the topics into one project. There are no tools to merge things like the index, the toc and the glossary but you might want to open the files in Notepad to explore manually merging them there. Just make sure you backup at different stages to make sure you can go backwards in case of need.

Keep it out of source control until you are happy you have got the one project working AOK.

[Captiv8r]

Welcome to our community, 771Y

In addition to my colleague Peter's excellent advice, please note that if you choose to experiment with that avenue, you will need to be certain the folder structure in the new consolidated project is an identical match. This is because the source files behind the TOC and Index will have pathing information expecting the folders. So even if you were to successfully combine them, it will all be an exercise in frustration if you have elected to rearrange the folders.

Cheers... Rick

[771Y]

Thanks for your help with this. Just a quick one on build tags. By merging all these projects into one, there maybe some topics that will need to be tagged to all 420 .chms. Do you know if there are any limits with these tags before i get too far into this? I know RH6 seemed not to have any limits whilst testing it (RH7 came along whilst testing RH6 so never actually tested RH7), so i would hope that RH7 would be the same?!!!

Also, would there be any way of importing the .chm files from all the projects or would i have to start again with that one?

I have the feeling i'll be gaining a few grey hairs by the time i've finished this!!!!

Many thanks,

[Peter Grainge]

"By merging all these projects into one, there maybe some topics that will need to be tagged to all 420 .chms."

Sorry, not following you.

"Also, would there be any way of importing the .chm files from all the projects or would i have to start again with that one?"

You mean your existing outputs? Why? You have them elsewhere. When they change you will create new ones from the new project.

[Peter Grainge]

"By merging all these projects into one, there maybe some topics that will need to be tagged to all 420 .chms."

Sorry, not following you.

"Also, would there be any way of importing the .chm files from all the projects or would i have to start again with that one?"

You mean your existing outputs? Why? You have them elsewhere. When they change you will create new ones from the new project.

[771Y]

Sorry, didn't make myself very clear!

Basically, i have a number of processes (topics) that are relevant to numerous life and pension products (topics). eg.coffadcom1.htm is relevant to all the products (420 of them) i hold on robohelp (currently split between 12 RH projects). Each project held around 35 products (therefore 35 .chms), so this file would have been tagged to 35 products. By merging to one project will need to tag that file to 420 products - is this possible, will the tagging system be able to handle this?

Hope this makes more sense?!

Thanks,

[Peter Grainge]

I read into your first post that you had not gone this route because you knew X5 could not handle that number of tags so by default I thought you had established RH7 or 8 could.

I don't know about any limits on the number of tags but am wondering is it the case that many of the topics are very similar other than maybe a product name and some details like age eligibility and so on. Maybe you could get multiple outputs from one topic by using variables?