MadCap Software Forums

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.

# 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.

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