copy project components doesn't seem to work

[cayennep]

I'm working from home and in the office
I copied the folders from my laptop onto my office desktop, including the Content and Project folders and the .flprj file (which doesn't seem to do much or change much).

However, changes I know I made are not being moved - notably, changing the Target conditions to not exclude everything, and changing the conditions on some things. Conditions in flare are already my nemesis (or one of them), but I'm still surprised that copying, well, doesn't.

any tips, hints, etc much appreciated

[lacastle]

How are you copying the project? I back up/copy my local flare project files back to my network drives all the time and have never had a problem with changes not going through.

[cayennep]

yup, that's what I'm doing
Good to know it works for you, can't imagine why the changes to the conditions didn't go thru as I moved whole folders, but will investigate a bit more, thanks

[lacastle]

are you moving the whole project (Content, Project, FileSync, Output, Analyzer, and .flprj) or individual parts? i move everything at the same time by moving the folder that all of these folders/files are saved in.

[Andrew]

Conditions are inside the files. If you have the files, but you don't have condition changes you made, there are only a few possibilities I can think of:

1) For whatever reason, the target / file in which you changed conditions was not saved. I've never had this happen to me, but I suppose it's a possibility.

2) When you copied the files (which I assume you copied using Windows Explorer), not all the files copied to overwrite the existing files.

3) You are pointing Flare at the old project, rather than the new one you copied over (it's easy to do this, given the lack of information in the "recent projects" lists in Flare).

[cayennep]

hmm, interesting - that project file is minimal, but rarely updated

I'm copying content and project folders (not output) but might be better off setting up perforce on my laptop as well as my work machine, if that's possible to synch to two machines

fyi, flare often doesn't save things. yesterday I was trying to change conditions on some targets and it kept reverting my changes and/or throwing errors. So I'd check and uncheck conditions to include/exclude, save the file, and my changes weren't made - or one would be made and I'd have to make the other and save again, sometimes multiple times.

this is a too-frequent occurrence, I have come to expect software to do what I tell it at least most of the time

[LTinker68]

I don't know if it's still an issue, but there used to be a problem with Flare not completely removing a condition tag when you deleted a condition in a topic. The condition tag would be empty (not condition specified) but the MadCap condition tag itself remained. I think that did used to cause problems. Don't know if that's still an issue in v7 or if was fixed awhile ago. When you run into these problems with condition changes not taking, open the topic in the Internal Text Editor and see if there are multiple condition tags at the same level, one empty, one specified, or just one empty one.

And, of course, submit a bug report. There might be something else going on. This is all assuming, of course, that you're not using source control, since you didn't mention it. If you are using source control, then the problem could be with that application and not Flare, or with the interface between that app and Flare.

[NorthEast]

Conditions are inside the files. If you have the files, but you don't have condition changes you made, there are only a few possibilities I can think of:

I'd also add that the conditions are not contained in all files, they're only included in text-based files which can be modified by Flare; such as topics, stylesheets, master pages, page layouts, and any file in the Project folder.

If you set a condition on a folder, or any file which is not created by Flare, or is not text/XML; Flare can't modify the file, so it creates a separate *.props file which includes the condition tag setting.
For example, if you set a condition on a folder, image file, or a Word document in your project; Flare will create a props file with the same name.

So if you haven't copied the props files too, then these folders/files will be missing their condition settings. Also, if you use a project import (global project linking), there's a bug in Flare which means it doesn't import these props files.