Thought Process about Importing TOCs

[jimgilliam]

Does my approach below seem like a sound idea based on the scenario? I'd appreciate all feedback.

Scenario
We have five products. Each product has its own Flare project for help documentation. Of course, I want to combine those into one project, so I've created a "common" project (or parent) that will be the one publishing output for users.

Instead of pulling all files into the parent project, I want each author to create a separate TOC that includes everything they want to be available in the parent project. Then, I will just import five TOCs (one from each project) into the parent and publish.

Wouldn't this be easier and work fine rather than importing files and then building the TOC in the parent project?

What caveats do you see with this approach?

Jim

[NorthEast]

If you're using a project import (global project linking), then the parent project would have to import all the files required to build the topics from each target, not just the TOC file.

So I presume you're thinking of using Auto-include linked files to get these files?
This would get the topic htm files and also anything they link to - like snippets, images, stylesheets, template pages.

One problem you might have is conflicts, if two projects contain a file that has the same name in the same folder location.

Generally speaking, if all the projects are going to be imported into the same master project anyway, then why bother with separate projects? Just have one project that contains all the content, and build individual targets from that.

[doloremipsum]

If you want to import a TOC and all of its related files, I think the best way is actually to import the target with Auto-Include enabled. That will grab the stylesheets, microcontent, skins and so on as well as the TOC, topics and snippets.

But I agree with NorthEast that it would be better to have all of the authors working in the same project if possible - that gives you the opportunity to share resources and contribute to each others' work. But I don't know how your team and products are structured, so maybe it wouldn't work for you. You would definitely need source control of some kind if you don't have it already, and the project will slow down a bit if it gets very big.