Phil, I hope you won't mind me coming in on this as I think
you are making merging sound just a bit more complex than it really
is.
At its simplest, you create a parent and the child projects.
You then just install whichever of the child projects you want for
a particular build.
Take a look at the topic on my site about merging webhelp.
There I describe how to have a parent with no content so that it
just acts as a shell. You supply that and just whichever child
projects you want. Done that way, when you generate you will find
that a mergedProjects folder is created with a folder for each
child and you generate each child project to just that one folder.
Done that way, when you regenerate a child it updates the whole
output as the whole output is in just one structure. It does not,
at this level, require lots of !SSL! folders. The method can be
adapted if CHM is your poison.
Now let's move on to more complex builds. Phil had a need
whereby there were different versions of each child plus other
things that varied with each build. Those things could have been
done by continually regenerating but it meant remembering the
nuances of each build. To address that Phil came up with an elegant
solution that used more than one target for a build. Imagine
numerous variations. You can either apply the conditions for each
build and then generate the required projects, remembering which
conditions and child projects are needed for that output or, as
Phil did, you create a number of parent projects which just refer
to the child projects for that build. That requires different
targets for each. Then each child instead of having just one
webhelp output has different ones for each build expression used.
Again each one has to go to the required parent's mergedProjects
folder.
I hope Phil will not mind me suggesting that first you look
at my topic and get your mind around merged webhelp at a simpler
level. When you understand how that is working, then is the time to
consider Phil's setup if you have more complex needs as he did.
Learn to drive something more basic before you jump into the
Ferrari or you will crash first time out!
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