MadCap Software Forums

I'm liking the new batch targets in V6 but I must admit to some confusion over the publishing feature.

Let me run through a scenario to see if someone can help clarify this for me...

I have a very simple help system with only three topics: Topic A, Topic B, and Topic C. Yesterday at noon, I built the output and published it to a local shared network drive (using the "File System" type of destination and not "FTP"). This morning, I modified Topic B and deleted Topic C. I've now re-built the help and wish to publish.

If the "Upload Only Changed Files" option is selected in the Publish Target dialog, does this mean that only Topic B would be uploaded?

If the "Remove Stale Files" option is selected in the Publish Target dialog, does this mean that the copy of Topic C that is currently on the shared network drive will be removed before the re-build help system is uploaded?

Thanks for any help and assistance with this.

That is exactly what is supposed to happen. Did you try it out and the result was different?

The trick, though, for batch publishing, is that those two options aren't present. I'm not sure what is "supposed" to happen when you do the batch build and publish. You'd hope, that since there isn't an option that Flare would remove orphaned files and upload all the rest, just to be safe. But I don't know what it actually DOES.

RamonS wrote:That is exactly what is supposed to happen. Did you try it out and the result was different?

We were having some issues with topics that we deleted somehow ended up still being in our "published" output. I'm not sure if this was something we were doing wrong but just to be safe, I was manually deleting and copying the files and folders myself... which kinda runs counter to the whole convenience that one-button publishing is supposed to provide, right?

I'm going to go back and try using the publishing feature once more and will report if we have any issues.

doc_guy wrote:The trick, though, for batch publishing, is that those two options aren't present. I'm not sure what is "supposed" to happen when you do the batch build and publish. You'd hope, that since there isn't an option that Flare would remove orphaned files and upload all the rest, just to be safe. But I don't know what it actually DOES.

I'd like to know this myself as I'd LIKE to use the publish feature with the batch feature (I especially like the scheduling aspect) but I'm not sure if I can trust it to correctly upload the files I want while getting rid of the files I don't want.

Thanks for the response.

Ask Support. They typically answer such questions reasonably quickly.