Extract a "Working Set" from bloated directory?

[Keith_Novice]

Hi,

My project is bloated with hundreds of files that are not used. Is there a way within RH to extract just the working set for the current project, or must I use the "unused" reports to script deletions?

Or is there some other more elegant way?

Thanks!
Keith

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

There's no automated way so you will need to do it manually or write a script. Be careful in the root of the project. Back with X3 there were various file types that got wrongly listed as unused. I believe it has been corrected but I am not sure it is 100% reliable.

Create a backup first.

[Keith_Novice]

Thanks Peter, appreciate the confirmation.

Keith

[Gravenstein]

A thought...

If you uploaded your project into RoboSource Control, you could then download it to another location, and you would get only files that belonged to the project. You could then remove the project from source control.

Mind you, if you haven't worked with RSC at all, it might not be worth your time to set it up.

G

[Keith_Novice]

A worthy idea - however, the project has never seen RSC. What do you think about the following?

1. 
   
2. Generate the project to a CHM (assumption being that only linked files, images, and topics would go into the CHM)
   
3. Reverse engineer the CHM using one of the methods on Peter Grainger's site: PG Reverse Engineering
   
4. Use the reverse engineered file set as the "working set"

I've tested the concept and it seems to work. However, with thousands of topics to track, I'm at a loss to quantify what useful information might have been lost.

Thoughts anyone?

[Gravenstein]

I'll defer to others on the reverse engineering idea, as I've not had any recent experience with it.

Another thought...You could make an update inside your project that would affect all your topics (say, assign a temporary conditional build tag to all topics), and then close the project. In Windows, do a search on *.htm at the top level of your project, and then sort the results by date. The topics with old dates would be the ones you could delete. After that was done, you could delete the build tag.

That wouldn't help with graphics, though.

G

[Keith_Novice]

Another good idea! That's an easy way to work with the HTM files anyway (about 90% of the total!).