I'm now considering throwing my entire document set into one Flare project, and I wondered about people's experiences of doing that, before I burn all my boats and regret it.
I've never really got my head properly round the global content. I use Global Project Linking, but however I handle it, I seem to have multiple copies of these files, one in each project that uses them, so I spend some time comparing and updating across the various copies of my "global" content. That's been an ongoing issue, and gets bigger and more fiddly each time I port another Word document to Flare. That wouldn't be an issue if my entire document set was in one Flare project - I'd just have a Global subfolder for the common content, and a subfolder for the content for each document (and more subfolders below that where necessary).
But the thing that looks like it may tip the balance is automating the build. I'd like to link the documentation build into our software build, and I have two ways to do it:
- Hook in a Flare build to our software build system (the Visual Studio Build tool, which allows you to specify a Flare step to build a target, or a batch target). Each step can only build targets from *one* Flare project, so if I port another document to Flare, in another project, I have to get the software guys to add a step to their build process to build the new document.
Write my own script to invoke Madbuild once for each Flare Project, then tell the software guys to add that script as a step in the build. In this case, if I port another document to Flare, i just update my script (which I can test locally) and the extra document gets built without a change to the build system, and ithout the possibility for introducing errors.
The latter appears the better engineering solution, but means that my script has to handle things like error checking, reporting errors and adding the Flare build logs to the overall build logs. However, the former apparently integrates well enough with Flare to collect the Flare logs, and detect any Flare errors, without me doing anything extra. Unless . . .
. . . and that's where the idea for putting all my documents into one Flare project came from. I can create one batch target, to build all my documents, and tell the Visual Studio Build tool to get on with it. No fiddling around for me, and no need to get developer help each time I port another document to Flare - I can just update the Flare batch target. I will no longer have multiple copies of "global" content, as it will all be in one project. And also, it will be easier to share snippets and other common content between documents (I haven't done much of that yet, but I plan to, as I port more content to Flare - I am expecting that to involve copying lots of duplicated content around between projects too).
So, dare I do this, or will I regret it?