Flare Project Linking, External Resources, or Door #3?

[KeithM]

I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle this situation (in V7). If I'm missing some functionality or other workaround you have successfully implemented, please chime in.

Situation: Three Flare projects, A, B, and C. B and C share topics with A (B and C do not share any with each other). There are many topics in several folders.

• I find the file-by-file Flare Project Import linking a little inefficient when adding or maintaining that many individual topics in separate folders (enhancement request sent some time ago for a folder-based option).
• External Resources falls short because I'd also have to map the images and manually sync.
• Door #3 (which seemed to work in a limited test): Add a conditional tag (e.g. 'Shared') to the folders in question in the source project, setup a new Flare Project Import File as you normally would with 'Topic Files (*.htm;*.html)' and 'Auto-include linked files' selected. Then, for Import Conditions, include that 'Shared' tag and select 'Auto-Exclude Non-Tagged Files'.

The Import Conditions may be old hat for some of you, but it just now occurred to me (after using Flare for 3 years) to try and use it for this situation.

[techwriter31]

# 3 is what I'm currently using. I've got global project linking set up with a single parent project and four child projects. The parent project holds the content that I share between all projects (page layouts, skins, stylesheets, common images, snippets, etc.). Within each of the child projects, I have the import file for the parent project. In addition, I also share content between child project A and child project B. In child project A, I added another import file, that imports content from child project B. But, I only need a few images and topics from child project B. In the import file, within the Include Files field I specified the file types to import, left the Exclude Files field blank (default = No Files), and set the Import Conditions to import only files with the specified condition tag and checked the Auto-Exclude Non-Tagged Files checkbox. So far, this has been working well for me.

I am in the process of investigating the External Resources feature, but haven't tried it out yet.

[DocuWil]

Maybe you could also have a look in the following post:
http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... 13&t=12331