Output folder in Content Explorer

[chendrickson]

I inadvertently built my output to the Content Explorer and I realize I have to select a different directory by opening the target and setting the Output folder option on the Basic tab.

However, I am unable to delete the Output folder that appears in the Content Explorer. Or, rather, I can delete it, but the folder comes back every time I reload Flare. I share my files with a colleague. We have both deleted the Output folder from our Content Explorer and deleted the Content folder from the Output folder that appears in the Temporary folder.

We now have three copies of all our files in the project: the files in the Content Explorer, the files in Content Explorer>Output>Content, and the files in Output>Temporary>Content. We are absolutely unable to permanently delete the extra copies of the files. Can anyone shed any light?

[RamonS]

First question: Do you have a known good backup? If yes, use it, if not, now you know why you should have had one.

What you could try is copy the folder out of Flare's reach and delete the output folders, then rename the project and load it as a new project into Flare.

How do you share the project without coworker? Network share? Source control? Source control may be putting things back if you or your coworker checked the goofed up project into source control. A "get all" will get all that stuff back.

Flare really should make it impossible to built into the project folder.

[KevinDAmery]

Also, if you haven't already, make sure that you change the target to be pointing to the correct location. (I suspect you've done that already, but I wasn't 100% certain so I thought I'd best make that explicit....)

[Richard Ferrell]

You may want to check out this KB article and see if this applies to you also.

http://kb.madcapsoftware.com/default_csh.htm#OUTA1007F

[chendrickson]

I checked the target and it is pointing to the correct location (ie: not the Content Explorer Folder). I share the project through source control with one other colleague. We are not sure how the output folder ended up in the content explorer, but our project is quite large and having three copies of the entire project in the Content Explorer folder is tending to slow us down. When we do finally resolve this, how do we avoid creating this problem in the future?

[KevinDAmery]

I suspect that David (aka RamonS) is right, and the project was checked into source control when the output was in the wrong place. So what you'll need to do is remove the incorrect copy from source control as well as from your work disks. You may have to go into the source control tool itself to do this, rather than doing it through the Flare interface.

[chendrickson]

This might be a dumb question, but where is the source control tool?

[KevinDAmery]

Sorry, guess that wasn't clear: I meant whatever application you are using for source control (i.e. Visual Source Safe, Team Foundation Server, CVS, etc.)

[chendrickson]

Thanks Kevin. We use the Visual Source Safe and removed the output folder from there. Everything is working normally. Thanks again, we really appreciate it.

[LTinker68]

One last bit of housekeeping you might need to take care of.

Open a few of the topics (the actual content files) in the Internal Text Editor or Notepad and see if there are any references to masterpages, stylesheets, etc. Most of those items are added to the output topics at build time. Since your output went into an output folder in the Content Explorer, then you might not have had any "cross contamination" of the original working content files. But if you did, then it can create problems for you later on. If you create a new topic from scratch and open it in the Internal Text Editor or Notepad then you'll see what type of references are included in the topic in the authoring environment. If you see other references in the older topic files, then you might have to do some cleanup of those topic files.