Is there an easy way to combine topics in Flare 4.2?

[swills22]

As I'm reformatting all my imported FrameMaker topics in Flare, I'm finding cases where I'd like to combine several topics into a single topic. An "import topic from another topic" option would be helpful! Is there an easier way to do this besides cutting and pasting from one topic to another? That breaks all my links.

Thanks.

[LTinker68]

There's no such import option, but if you want to keep all the links and such, open both topics in the Internal Text Editor. That'll show you the page source (code). Copy the code and content that you want (make sure you include the opening and closing tags around the relevant content) and paste it into the destination topic. Save that topic, close the Internal Text Editor, then open the topic as normal to see all the content you just pasted, including the links.

[forfear]

No such feature yet.

Copy and paste is what you need.


How about submitting a request for a

Split Topic and Merge Topics feature.

https://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

I've done it!

[NorthEast]

There's no such import option, but if you want to keep all the links and such, open both topics in the Internal Text Editor. That'll show you the page source (code). Copy the code and content that you want (make sure you include the opening and closing tags around the relevant content) and paste it into the destination topic. Save that topic, close the Internal Text Editor, then open the topic as normal to see all the content you just pasted, including the links.

Not sure I follow you there, that still won't fix the problem of the broken links.

If you have broken links, then I'm guessing the topic you're copying from is in a different folder to the topic you're copying to. What I would suggest is to move both topics into the same folder, e.g. move the topic you're copying from into the same folder as the topic you're copying to. When you move a topic, Flare will update the links in the topics for you. Then when you copy text from one topic to another, any links in the text will have the same relative path so they won't be broken.

[KevinDAmery]

As I'm reformatting all my imported FrameMaker topics in Flare, I'm finding cases where I'd like to combine several topics into a single topic. An "import topic from another topic" option would be helpful! Is there an easier way to do this besides cutting and pasting from one topic to another? That breaks all my links.

Thanks.

Lets look at this from a different tack: was the content in question combined in Frame, or separate? If it was combined, I'm guessing you probably had one or more of the topic breaking options enabled during the import (for example, break topics after x number of words). If that was the case, and assuming you haven't done much work on the project since the import, I would be more inclined to turn those options off, remove the existing topics completely, and reimport the content fresh. I find it works better to tell Flare to break topics based on headings in the source rather than on an arbitrary number of words or the like.

[swills22]

I tried combining the topics in the Internal Text Editor as Lisa suggested. The links from the combined topic work fine. Unfortunately, cross-reference links from other topics to the pasted-in topic are broken. They're looking for the original file name.

BTW, all my files are still in a single folder because whenever I try to reorganize them, lots of links break--but that's another subject.

Kevin: The content was imported as separate topics from Frame but now, as I'm visiting each (and every!) topic in the project to fix the formatting, I'm finding short topics that should be combined. This isn't true of all instances of this heading level so changing my import options wouldn't help, unfortunately.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I will file an enhancement request for this as forfear suggests.

[forfear]

Log it up

[LTinker68]

There's no such import option, but if you want to keep all the links and such, open both topics in the Internal Text Editor. That'll show you the page source (code). Copy the code and content that you want (make sure you include the opening and closing tags around the relevant content) and paste it into the destination topic. Save that topic, close the Internal Text Editor, then open the topic as normal to see all the content you just pasted, including the links.

Not sure I follow you there, that still won't fix the problem of the broken links.

I took it as meaning he was copying from the front-end (XML Editor) and pasting it into another topic didn't include the underlying href code. Not that the original code contained broken links. I may not have read the post well, though, and may have missed it.

[swills22]

The links were not broken before I combined the topics. The links that were broken after I combined the topics were links TO the topic that I had pasted into the existing topic (these were cross-reference links that were looking for a specific file name).

[NorthEast]

Ah, you'll need to do those manually, Flare's good but it's not that clever!

For any more topics that you still have to edit/remove, if you right-click the topic and select Show dependencies, that'll show you which other topics link to it.

[swills22]

I was asked off list about whether I had found a solution to my problem. In reading through the other responses, I believe my workaround might have been a suggestion someone else posted. Just in case it helps, this is how I got around the problem of broken links in combined topics:
Before I do an import from a FrameMaker project, I evaluate the headers in the FrameMaker files and make changes so the topics are merged automatically and don't need to be merged manually later. For example, if I have an H1 then three H2s in a row in Frame that I want together in a single topic in Flare, I change the H2s to H3s in Frame before the import and then set the import to start new topics only with H1s and H2s.