MadCap Software Forums

Not sure if I have the right forum, but global linking seems like a single-sourcing topic, right?

I've a question regarding how to link between the top-level (main project) and subprojects.

I've set up a project using the global linking feature with one top-level (global) project and two child projects. I placed the topics that would be common across the child projects in the top-level (global) project.

And after importing these global topics in each child project, I use cross-references to refer to global topics in the child project. No problem.
But, I don't know how to refer to a child project from the global project. Or from one child project to another. Since the child projects appear only as links in the TOC, I can't refer to their topics specifically. If I have to use external hyperlinks, it'll be painful as we're hosting our help independent of the application.

This is an image of my global project where aqua items are shared across projects and I use the TOC to link child projects.

Can anyone set me on the right path?

Seems to me this a limitation of project linking, and possibly a wise rule to live by with modular documentation - that is, the global/parent project should stand-alone. If you start linking from the global topics to children, then those links will break when including those topics in other child projects.

In saying that, if you really want this to work, you may be able to hack it as follows:
1) Give all your parent topics a special name (e.g. "_parentWorkingWithWidgets.htm")
2) Use global project linking to link your child project(s) back into the parent
3) Use internal cross references as normal to link children topics to your parent topics
4) When using project linking in your child projects to copy the global topics, make sure to import only those topics with "_parent"

Not sure why you would want to link from a child to another child? If two help systems are on the same server and you want to link to another help system, then use an external link and the format <a href="..\..\HelpDir\Default.htm#StartTopic=xyz.htm"> xyz </a>

GregStenhouse wrote:Seems to me this a limitation of project linking, and possibly a wise rule to live by with modular documentation - that is, the global/parent project should stand-alone. If you start linking from the global topics to children, then those links will break when including those topics in other child projects.

I agree with Greg. Keep a global project for key standard items like stylesheets, page layouts, condition sets, non-changing printed topic templates, etc. Why? If you do this, this prevents you from going down a frustrating monkey puzzle of a path later on ,when you might be importing topics and other content from other projects and get confused with content being imported from all over the place.

If you want to share global content :
- 1 Global project- restricted for page layouts, snippets, stylesheets, condition sets, var sets, skins.
- For all other shared content imported projects - use for topics only.

I hope this clear