Search across multiple projects

[jkpalmer]

Hi,

Our business has been using Flare for a couple of years or so and has developed many independent web based projects that use conditional tags quite extensively to filter "who can see what".

Recently, we realized that these independently published projects pose some issues, most importantly, we would like to be able to have all these projects "searchable" from a single publication.

There are probably several ways to solve this challenge, but after talking with Madcap Support, they suggested that the best way may be to use Global Project Linking.

I began investigating this strategy and it appears to be a very viable alternative, but I seem to get hung up on publishing and conditional tags.

Because these projects were developed independently over time, the conditional tags in one project are different than another, so who can see what becomes more or an issue.

I'm babbling a little, but I guess my question to the community is: Is there a "best practices" that anyone could share which would highlight your experiences, what to watch out for, or what has worked for your development process in a similar situation?

TIA

Jim Palmer

[NorthEast]

Using a project import (global project linking) will simply just import content from your other projects into a single project.

Once all the content is in the same project, you can build a single target that contains all of your content - so you can therefore search all of that content.

However, before you do this, you need to design/structure the individual projects so that they can "live together" in a single project.
So that might involve things like moving topics into subfolders (to avoid filename conflicts), or changing conditions and variables (to either avoid conflicts, or to use common names).

[jkpalmer]

Dave,

It appears that it becomes a learning experience based upon each publishers specific requirements.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Regards,

Jim P.