Updating large number of Topics

[Guest]

Hello All,

I'm looking for some advice from the community regarding something my business users are looking at doing.  They have an upcoming project, this upcoming project requires updating a large amount of procedures within a RoboHelp project, and during a project cutover weekend, these large number of changes will go live.

So up until the cutover weekend as users are updating the procedures, none of these changes can be made available until the cutover weekend; i.e. these changes must remain hidden.  Along with these users making changes for this cutover weekend, users will be making daily changes and publishing these changes.

What's the best way to be working on these bulk changes, and come cutover weekend have these changes appear.  Are there options to have these marked in draft, as the project is being generated, these changes are not be incorporated into the generated project.  Also, for any of the updated topics, the previous version needs to be archived, and available under a separate archived section within the same project.  Also, any links to the topic need to be maintained; i.e. if a topic is updated and replaced with a newer version, all links to the existing topic need to point to the new topic.

Just wondering if the community had some advice on how best to accomplish this.

Thanks in advance for the assistance!

Dave

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi Dave. You have the following options:

1. Publish the help to a new separate location. Then at the appointed time change the link to the help file to point to it. This has the advantage that you have the archive and of course hiding the information from your users until the appointed time. You don't say how the help is accessed, but the disadvantage of this approach is that all links (i.e. any inside an application) would have to be changed.
   
2. Do not publish the output at all until the appointed time. You'd have to manually take a copy of the existing help for your archive. You could use the command line to generate the output at a specific time if need be.

My preferred option is solution 1.

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The RoboColum(n)

@robocolumn

Colum McAndrew

[MergeThis]

In addition to the multiple build locations suggested by Colum, it seems like conditional build tags would be your best bet. You don't say what version you're using (naughty, naughty), but RH8 allows you to conditionalize entire topics as well as pieces of content within topics.

You'll need to spend some time thinking about what tags you would need, then create the several conditional expressions required for individual daily and weekly builds. The RH help provides a good explanation and some pertinent examples. Keep in mind that all content without a tag always gets generated/compiled, whereas tagged content can be included or excluded (AND, NOT).

Good luck,

Leon

[Guest]

Sorry for not including the version (probably a forum rule), we are running 8.0.2.  Users have suggested an interesting option, one that I haven't had time to experiment with.  Basically make the changes inline, and find a way to hide those changes.  When it comes time to cutover, duplicate the topic (add archive to the title) and remove the new changes, move to archive area of TOC.  Take the new topic, remove the old content, take the hidden content and unhide it.

For me this is purely theoretical, I have not attempted this.  Users tried to delete and rename, it was a disaster.

Thanks for the advice.