How to carry out Global project linking without damage?

[CoolLime]

Here is the situation: I am responsible for 4 documentation projects which are different in much of their content, but have common elements that I want to reuse such as variables and styles, in particular--up until now, I have just copied over the stylesheets or variable sets manually, and these inevitably get changed ad hoc only in the project that I am working on--an undesirable thing for implementing single sourcing. My understanding is that creating a global master project and then linking these existing projects might be a good way to solve this problem, but I am worried about causing damage.

Specifically, if I change the individual stylesheet in these projects and point to the new Global one, will it just work? And what about variable sets or conditions, what do I have to watch out for there?

[NorthEast]

It should work fine.
I use a global project in all our projects, and store it on a network drive so the path is the same from all projects.
In my global project I set a condition tag on each file to include in the import, then in each project I only import files tagged with that condition.


You mentioned files "inevitably get changed ad hoc", so I'd first check these files in your projects (and maybe back them up).

The files that you import from your global project will overwrite the files in your projects.
You can set up the import to be automatic (using Auto-reimport...), although I don't use this as I prefer to run a reimport in each project manually.

You will need to tell people about the new process and not to edit any imported files - because their changes might be overwritten.
Flare will warn them if they edit an imported file, but people can still save the file (and even exclude the file from the import).


There's nothing that special about conditions and variables, you just have to bear in mind that anything you include in the import needs to work in all your projects.
People can't change your imported conditions/variables file, but they can add their own conditions/variables file to a project. If a variable needs to be project/target specific, then remember you can change it in a target's Variables tab without changing the Variable file itself.

[CoolLime]

Re. Conditions and variables, aren't one or both of them subject to getting broken inside the topics when you, say, change the name of the condition or variables, or the locations of those files (the global project linking will involve moving the stylesheet up to the global project as well as some variable sets, for example)?

[CoolLime]

I might add that at current, I am the sole owner of these projects, so my concern is not interference from others, only breaking the styles, variables and conditions that exist in topics currently, not to mention any other problems I am not foreseeing here--I haven't even begun to consider how cross-references might be affected...

[NorthEast]

Re. Conditions and variables, aren't one or both of them subject to getting broken inside the topics when you, say, change the name of the condition or variables, or the locations of those files (the global project linking will involve moving the stylesheet up to the global project as well as some variable sets, for example)?

Not really, because you won't be changing them.

If you use a project import, then the files you import will be identical in each project - i.e. you will have the same conditions, variables, stylesheets, etc.
So you'll only include files your import that you want to be the same in each project.

So say you want to create more conditions or variables in an individual project, then you can add new files to that project; but you don't edit any of the the conditions/variables that came from the import.