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Same Topics Spanning Multiple Projects

Carl

02 April 2012 20:58

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We have similar functionality across multiple products and would like to create and manage help topics for these only once rather than recreating topics in multiple projects and when a change is needed, have to go edit those topics in all the projects and hopefully not miss one or end up with them in consistent. What is the best way to do this in HelpStudio 2011? Thanks.

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6 comments

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  Matt Bates 09 May 2012 07:12

  The solution for this scenario would be to keep all of your content in a single HelpStudio project then use Build Flags and Build Profiles to create multiple outputs that contain a specific sub-set of content. You can find a tutorial movie on using Build Flags here: http://www.innovasys.com/movies/viewmoviefeed.aspx?id=57bb26bd-a62c-452c-92ab-b9b449ee27e3

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  Carl 14 May 2012 12:20

  Thanks. That, for us, would be a nightmare, as such a help system would span an architectural / server suite help system and a half dozen products, so we'd have to do a Union of all documentation and put in a large quantity of build flags, presuming of course that structuring would allow the needed diversity between products (how the help is organized). If you had some mechanism to "include" pages by reference from another help systems, merged in at compile, that would be simply marvelous. Just a suggestion and something to ponder.
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  Carl 14 May 2012 12:28

  One of the things we did was use the same image names across projects, since images do not copy well from one project to another (you might smooth that out, it would be nice), then we have a master project where we copy and paste the text into the other projects. Not elegant, but sorta works. From a programming standpoint, which many here are programmers I'm sure, that is like duplicating the same code by copy / paste from one product to another, rather than having a shared library. This is frowned upon, of course. The Build Flag method is like putting different applications in one big application project then using build flags to make the different products. I suspect that Microsoft does not have Word and Excel in the same project and just use build flags, but I could be wrong (wink).
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  Richard Sloggett 18 May 2012 04:54

  One idea that we have used here in the past it to create and maintain a separate project for your common topics and images and then periodically import that project into your other projects, selecting the "Overwrite existing" option. That avoids the duplication, although it does require that manual import step to keep the other projects up to date.

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  Carl 23 May 2012 08:59

  Thank you. That seems to be a workable idea. We'll give it a try.
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  Martin Merkel 23 December 2013 10:41

  The proposed solution with one common project from which all other can be manually populated is not a particular good approach. One would like to main individual files that are maintained as entirely independent file in a version control system and each time an automatic build for one of the HS projects that include them, they are pulled out automatically from the version control system and included in the build. This first of all avoids manual intervention, and secondly avoids that somebody forgets that there is an update topic in the master project that needs to be pulled over. I'm currently using 2013.1 and found this one of the oddities of HS that all textual help content is included in the one and only project file. I hope that this will be changed for future versions.