I have a question about the auto-merge feature that you can set up on a server and coordinate in the toc (this is for html5 output). I want to do it in a single project.
I have a project that has documentation for a dozen or so different software products that are on different release cycles, that is, the doc needs to be published at different times. These docs share a lot of common info (via snippets, mostly) and have links among themselves, as well as to a common framework product. So I want to set up what I call target publishing (not to be confused with Flare targets) so I can publish the docs selectively without updating other docs. It appears the auto merge feature can handle this, assuming I set up separate TOCs and Web targets for each product, and merge them at runtime. My question is, will the merging preserve all of my cross-references? Flare help mentions that indexes and search capabilities are consolidated, but I just wanted to verfy same for the xrefs. And is there anything else I need to be aware of?
Thanks
Question about Auto-merge feature-html5 output
Re: Question about Auto-merge feature-html5 output
Same question about xrefs and further, what about the alias files? I want to merge two projects at runtime. Will the alias files in each project still work for CSH? I am sad that I don't see any response to this question. Is that because the answer is easy?
Re: Question about Auto-merge feature-html5 output
If what you mean by "Auto-Merge" is the ability to add help topics to an existing help installation, it seems to only work for WebHelp Plus outputs on servers running the IIS server.
When you search in a Flare WebHelp environment, JavaScript does the work--it looks at data files that are part of the output to find the topic files that match. It doesn't seem that difficult to extend this functionality to look in more than one place for data files. If it could do this, the user could install the product and get product help, then install an add-on and automatically see add-on help when they bring up Flare. This is the functionality promised by WebHelp Plus and IIS, but not for HTML5.
When you search in a Flare WebHelp environment, JavaScript does the work--it looks at data files that are part of the output to find the topic files that match. It doesn't seem that difficult to extend this functionality to look in more than one place for data files. If it could do this, the user could install the product and get product help, then install an add-on and automatically see add-on help when they bring up Flare. This is the functionality promised by WebHelp Plus and IIS, but not for HTML5.