How to copy content between Flare branches?

[skwpt]

I have a dilemma where I need to backport a significant update from master to an earlier branch.

ENVIRONMENT

• Single Flare12 project is bound to Git via the Flare interface
• Two branches
• Single-person writing team

I was hoping I could run two instances of Flare and copy tables from master into the previous branch. However, because everything is in one project, Flare throws a warning that project is already checked out.

Did I set things up incorrectly? Is there a way to work around this in my current environment? I didn't see any tips/best practices in the Flare 12 Git guide.

[LeslieT]

Sadly, I do not think you can do this if you are using the Flare-Git source control and project binding. If you simply use Git with a standard Git client (such as SourceTree) you can merge changes from Master to a branch or you can cherry-pick one or more specific commits to that branch (probably the best option is the branch is a previous release that is "behind" the current master.

I hope this makes some sense.

[skwpt]

Thanks, Leslie. I has been using SourceTree in Flare 11, but I abandoned it when Flare 12 supported SSH.

I still set things up incorrectly in the new Git environment. Going forward, I need to create one project for each archived/released doc version, and have a Git repo created for each version.

Here is MadCap Flare Support's workaround for a topic overwrite:

• Open the source (master) branch in Flare.
• From the ribbon, select Project > Open Output folder.
• Copy the Content folder to another location, such as the Desktop.
• In Flare Source Control ribbon, switch to the target branch.
• Open Output folder for that branch.
• Open the Content folder and overwrite the older topics with the newer files

This method won't necessarily be seamless or fast. The copy/paste method works only for complete file overwrites. I'd renamed ALL *.htm files since the previous version (Marketing wanted hyphen delimiters instead of CamelCase), and there will be TONS of link checking, especially as the newer guide has about 100 new topics, so the TOC will have lots of broken links.

I won't make the same mistake again, that's for sure!