Path link for Importing Project

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ewilson
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Path link for Importing Project

Post by ewilson »

We have multiple guides for a product, some content is duplicated so all this content is in a separate project. Conditional text tags are used on each file so the import file within each guide only pulls in the topics relevant to that guide.
All our projects are stored in SharePoint site so that we can all access, updating is managed by OneDrive.
https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare20 ... inking.htm

That has been working fantastically. Until we hired a second person. Turns outs that the link to the "shared" project that is hard-coded on the import settings is mapping as my personal C:drive. Therefore when my co-worker attempts to import, it fails. If it was a relative link, then it would just reference to other project file that is in adjacent but its not doing that. When picking the other project it is representing the path as my C drive. Its not really on my C drive - its in my OneDrive.... which I guess gets represented as "C:"?

How are other people doing this? Every example and instructions I see for this feature show a hard-coded C: drive path. How do others "share" projects with co-workers?
https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare20 ... Files1.htm
doloremipsum
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Re: Path link for Importing Project

Post by doloremipsum »

That's a common trap! As you've observed, by default the import file uses an absolute link to a location in your drive instead of a relative link. However, you can easily replace this with a relative link - provided that the Flare projects have the same relative positions on all PCs.

For example, our Project A is always stored in the same folder as the Global project. So the import file for project A has the link: ..\..\..\Global\Global.flprj

You can open the import file in Project Organizer > Imports to edit this.

(Standard disclaimer: It's generally not recommended to share Flare projects using Sharepoint/Onedrive because Flare generates a lot of temporary files - at least you might want to try exclude the Analyzer and Output folders from the syncing.)
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NorthEast
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Re: Path link for Importing Project

Post by NorthEast »

You could ask people to use the same folder structure on their PCs, but in practice that may be tricky.

Our workaround is to set up a drive letter mapping on each person's PC that points to their own Flare project folder.
For example, on my PC I would map drive P: to c:\dave\projects, and someone else might map their drive P: to d:\stuff\things\flareprojects\
Then when we set up a project import, we browse to drive P: to select the project, so the Source Project path in the import file would look like: P:\ImportProject\ImportProject.flprj. As the import is relative to P:, it will work on all our PCs because the structure inside P: is the same.

@doloremipsum - Does editing the import file (flimp) in a text editor to change the project path to a relative link work ok for you? I know the import file also stores the path of each individual file as a Source and AbsoluteSource, so do you not have to do any additional steps to manually edit those too and fix them after each reimport?
ewilson
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Re: Path link for Importing Project

Post by ewilson »

OMG! Solving life's problems here!

Really - I should have attempted to just edit the path field. I thought I had tried that yesterday and it wouldn't let me. But it did today. Fabulous!

And to answer @Dave Lee, I edited the file in Flare. Just placed cursor into the path URL previously created and manually type in what you want. You do have to know how many folders the system has to backtrack up to the level where you want to change over to the other folder. But If all your project folders are in the same location, then it would typically be 3, hence: ..\..\..\OtherFolder\OtherProject.flprj

I did discover after posting this that OneDrive/SharePoint are not recommended and agree, syncing gets bogged down, but for the moment until we figure out a proper source control process this is fantastic.

Thanks for the help!
Erin
ewilson
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Re: Path link for Importing Project

Post by ewilson »

I have attempted to apply this same methodology to the Destinations path used for publish location which uses the File System option but that did not work with the same success. It still wants to put file:/// in front of the path so therefore turns it into file:///..\..\..\FolderName and thinks there are blanks/whitespace.
doloremipsum
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Re: Path link for Importing Project

Post by doloremipsum »

@doloremipsum - Does editing the import file (flimp) in a text editor to change the project path to a relative link work ok for you? I know the import file also stores the path of each individual file as a Source and AbsoluteSource, so do you not have to do any additional steps to manually edit those too and fix them after each reimport?
I've never had any problems with editing the path of the import file. Interestingly, when I look in the XML the Source and AbsoluteSource for the project say the same thing (both the relative path), whereas the AbsoluteSource of the files themselves does seem to be an absolute path.
Screenshot 2022-07-22 155904.png
Certainly the AbsoluteSource of the files is not changing whenever one of us imports or it would be showing up in the Git logs. I think the AbsoluteSource is fixed showing the path for my work PC, but it doesn't seem to cause any problems for my coworker or even my home PC which have different absolute paths for the files. In my experience if the relative paths are the same on all PCs (i.e. everyone keeps their Flare projects in the same folder, even if that folder is different on different computers), it just seems to work.
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doloremipsum
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Re: Path link for Importing Project

Post by doloremipsum »

Addendum to the above - possibly this is not a problem for us because of my weird import file/source control setup, which I forgot about when writing the above post. See this forum convo: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=33896&p=145012#p145012
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