Hi wizardmatt. Let me try and answer some of the questions.
How the TOC is setup is largely up to you. Most people have
the master project with no topics in it. in this case the master
TOC just needs to have the slave projects added to it which
displays the slave TOCs in the order in which they are added. If
the master project does have topics this is OK and you just add the
slaves in the master TOC where you want them to appear.
The other questions you ask are a little more difficult to
answer without knowing what format of help you are providing and a
little more detail. In the scenario you refer to are you using
redirection topics to display the content of a single topic (i.e.
there are multiple references in various slave projects that really
just display a single topic content)? If this is the case you only
need to change the topic with the content.
Regarding the search function, it works across all of the
slave projects as well as the master. I know of no way to limit the
search to specific slaves other than excluding them from the
compile (e.g. using conditional build tags). If you are using
webhelp I know some users use a third party search utility which
you may be able to use to limit the search to specific projects.
There is also a way of "hiding" individual topics from the search
but you'd have to do this on all the topics in the slave project
which may be long winded for what you want. If you want this, you
can find out how to do this in ACE Rick Stone's
Tips
n Tricks file.
Come back if you have any further questions