Global project linking imported entire other project!

[KCinColorado]

I have two projects: VMB and SSC. Many months ago, while working on VMB, I set up global project linking, to import the stylesheet (*.css) and snippets (*.flsnp) from SSC. Every time I worked with VMB, I kept the SSC project open so I could jump in and update styles as needed. All worked great.

Then I moved on to SSC for many months. Now I'm back on the VMB project. The first time I generated Webhelp, I noticed it was importing a bunch of stuff. It appears to have imported many if not all of the .htm files from the SSC project! Argh!

I added a new condition called VMBShared_File in the SSC project, and applied that condition to the three snippets and one style sheet that I want to import. I did not check "Delete stale files" or "Auto-Exclude Non-Tagged Files." Wasn't sure about those and had a hard time finding info on them.

So all those imported SSC files are still in my VMB project and show up when you do a search in WebHelp. How to get all the extraneous stuff OUT of the VMB project without affecting the SSC project?

Any help appreciated. I still don't understand why it imported all those files in the first place. I checked my Imports file as soon as it happened, and it clearly is set to import only *.css and *.flsnp. ???

kc

[ajturnersurrey]

You could get rid of the stuff you don't want by brute force, ie. just delete the superfluous topics in VMB, though the effort involved may be significant. This will not affect the copies of the same topics in SSC.

Then take a look at your import in VMB. Maybe you left the box "auto-include linked files" checked (box just under the specification of file types to include) - that could explain the surprise arrival of loads of extra files.

Take a look at your Import Conditions, and if you chose to include items tagged as VMBShared_File, then do tick auto-exclude non-tagged files.

[KCinColorado]

Thanks for the reply. I ended up working this issue with MadCap support yesterday, after rolling back to a previous version of VMB Help from source control. You were right, I had selected the "auto include linked files" box, and I don't recall changing that, so I'm not sure why the "mass import" didn't happen months ago, when I first set this up! But that explained why the entire SSC project came in. One of the file types I was wanting to import was .css, and all of the topics in SSC were linked to it, and all their screen shots, etc., were linked to those topics, so I got the whole project pretty much.

Another issue was: When I did a manual Reimport, after unselecting the auto include box and adding the condition setting, the dialog that asks you to approve the files being imported was BLANK so I just clicked OK. The reason it was blank was because I had specified two file types: .css;.flsnp in the box where you specify the type of file to import. Apparently, Flare doesn't allow multiple file types there. So it would give you a blank list of files. We had to reset that box (sorry, don't have it in front of me to give exact labels), set it to All Files, and set exclude to No Files, and then apply the condition parameter. A manual Reimport then produced a confirmation box with a proper list of files to import, that included only those with the condition tag. Whew!