Sharing content between multiple projects?

[todd.richardson]

Hello,

I’m seeking suggestions for a content organization scenario where I believe single-sourcing would help.

We have two products, each with its own Flare Help source project (I’ll call them A and B). So far, there is some content overlap between these source projects, but not much, mostly project resources (stylesheets, skins, etc.), which we maintain in a separate Flare project and share between the two product Help source projects using Global Project Linking (GPL).

A recent decision was made to port functionality from Product A to Product B. As a result, The Help outputs for Product A and Product B will contain 100+ files worth of identical content for that shared functionality. That content source is currently maintained in Flare Project A.

I want to avoid duplicate copies of the same topic files across projects, so single-sourcing seems the best option. However, I could use some help determining the best structure.

A few ideas:
1. Keep the shared content source in Flare Project A and use GPL to import that content into Flare Project B.
2. Move the shared content source into a separate Flare project and use GPL to import it into both Flare Project A and Flare Project B.
3. Combine Flare Project A and Flare Project B. For reference:
• Flare Project A contains 24,748 files (444 MB).
• Flare Project B contains 3,100 files (60 MB).[/list]

It’s worth noting that the two projects may share more content in future versions.

I like the simplicity of option 3, though I worry about performance with a Flare project that large (28,000+ combined files and counting, 500 MB+).

Any suggestions?

Hyperlinks in shared topic files
Another issue I’m stuck on is managing hyperlinks in shared topic files. For example, imagine Shared Topic 1 is shared between Flare Project A and Flare Project B via GPL. This topic contains a See Also section with links to different files in Flare Project A and Flare Project B:

See also:
• Link 1 (Targets File X in Flare Project A and File T in Flare Project B)
• Link 2 (Targets File Y in Flare Project A and File U in Flare Project B)
• Link 3 (Targets File Z in Flare Project A and File V in Flare Project B)

How would I set this up so that the hyperlinks in the shared topic target the appropriate files in their respective Flare projects, specifically when the target file(s) don’t exist in the parent source project (the project where the imported topic is shared from)?

I hope I’m missing an obvious solution here. Any help would be appreciated.

[NorthEast]

I'd strongly suggest going for (3) combined project.

Any solution using project imports / GPL will impose limitations and give you a much less flexible solution than using a combined project.

Since project A has 24,000 files already, I wouldn't expect the performance to much different by adding 3,000 files.

I would only ever suggest using project imports / GPL if the projects are essentially independent of each other, and you just want to bundle together some content for a single output. Using Project imports / GPL does not work well if the projects are integrated and you need links between content in each project.

Your question about links highlights one of the limitations of project imports / GPL. You can't have links from a file that's being imported to the parent project that is importing that file, since the thing you're linking to doesn't exist in the current project. Although you could manually enter broken links that would work in the parent after the file is imported, that could be a usability/maintenance headache. You can only really have links that work in one direction, from content in the parent project to the imported file.

[todd.richardson]

Thanks for the reply. I agree a combined project is probably the best solution.

[ChoccieMuffin]

From what I understand, Madcap has one mega-project for all their stuff, so it can certainly cope. Option 3 seems to be the way to go.