Project Imports often "quietly" fails

[peterbrown05]

Hello
we have a "master" project in which we have most of our inhouse styles/graphcis/skins etc defined.
we then have a number of projects which essentially contain the product specific topic but import all of the styles etc from the master project.

I have recently noticed that the "Reimport..." step often fails even if I select all items and click import. No errors; just the project tree doesnt refresh and files are not imported.
Also building a target - the "auto impiort often comes back as "failed" but with no reason why....

I dont know if the issue has always been there, only started once we moved to Win7 or since the v7 flare upgrade.

Anyone else have random success with the auto import?

[lacastle]

I've been using auto-import for a few weeks now and it seems to work every time for me. if there are no changes in the master, though, it may look like it's failing because it's not picking up anything.

No errors; just the project tree doesn't refresh and files are not imported.

What are you expecting to change when you reimport? i don't usually have any "new" files to import, just updates to existing files. Do you think it fails because nothing changes, or does it actually say "failed"?

[peterbrown05]

a few failure modes;

it sometimes does not pick up new files from the master. eg new .htm topics (even though *.htm;*.html is selected in import options).
and
it sometimes does not pick up files that have changed

I *THINK* this happens when the dialog shows some files as being "source is newer" or "dest is newer" where it highlights cells in green/red.

I've not quite figured out a pattern for this...

[lacastle]

I *THINK* this happens when the dialog shows some files as being "source is newer" or "dest is newer" where it highlights cells in green/red.

If you select all of the checkboxes on this screen, only the files that say "source is newer" will update and overwrite the older versions in the project.

here is the page in the flare help about re-importing - http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... ojects.htm

[peterbrown05]

i think thats the problem... when this happens a dialog box appears saying "are you sure" (paraphrasing), and you say yes. It goes away and thinks about things but then nothing gets updated...
or so it seems.

then run the import again and you get the same files being reported as "missing" or newer/older and as such never seem to get updated.

I think if I unselect all items that show as older/newer (highlighted in greeb/red) and click import then the others come in ok...

its wierd.
it does seem that once something is highlighted in red/green then an import will fail unless all of those items are uncheched...
definately looks wrong to me,

[peterbrown05]

ok; so after more digging ; the import will always fail if some of the files show up in RED. ie the destination is newer.
Potentially a few times I have updated a linked file to just quickly try something out knowing (?!) that it would be overwritten on an import. Even if i select the item to explicityly update and say "yes" to the overwrite confirmation; it doesnt actually do so.

Anyway, I now know what is wrong. whether this is a bug or not is hard to call. I suppose I'd prefer it didnt overwrite my files if i had accidentally made changes in the destination; but equally it doesnt seem to quite work how I would expect...
thanks for the help anyway,
cheers
peteB

[ajturnersurrey]

Like you I have some suspiscions about import, but haven't investigated enough yet to be certain of the conditions for failure. My gripe has been reimports being unable to spot and include some newly created topics, I suspect because nothing that they have previously imported has changed the import doesn't spot the completely new stuff, which would be a bug.

In a hurry I have created a new import, deleted the old one, and overcome my difficulty by brute force!

If I get a moment I will test this again and see exactly what is happening.

[Heike K]

Hi there,
I have the same or a similar problem (with no red but a lot of green files) and will open a bug report about it, attaching my projects.
Cheers
Heike