Pasting from another Project = topic title + "2" ?

[Dave Gehman]

Floating Server License

Situation:
We have a long-standing project that holds our company's software online documentation, which is delivered to the world via WebHelp. Until recently, everything in this H+M project has been added by me.

Just recently, thanks to the floating license, we have now other people contributing.

One contributor immediately began by creating his own project and putting his documentation work into it. Our company rewards fast action and independent work, so there's no issue with this... he did it before we decided that everyone will be contributing directly to the long-standing H+M project.

So, all his work should now be brought into the original docs project.

Since we could open his project AND the docs project simultaneously in H+M, we thought we could simply copy his topics and drop them into the docs project.

And all the topics indeed pasted into the ongoing docs project right where we placed the cursor in the TOC. Yay!

The puzzle:
In their new home, which is the old docs project, each of the pasted topics have an appended number which seems to be either _0 or _2. In other word, My helper's "Custom UI" topic became "Custom UI_0" and, e.g., "UIDropDown" became "UIDropDown_2"

Why?

What should we have done differently? Or, perhaps a better phrasing of the question, what is the best way to get my new contributor's work into our old project in its exact form, no added numbers, no added anything?

[Tim Green]

Hi Dale,

In their new home, which is the old docs project, each of the pasted topics have an appended number which seems to be either _0 or _2. In other word, My helper's "Custom UI" topic became "Custom UI_0" and, e.g., "UIDropDown" became "UIDropDown_2"

That means that the topics you pasted in had IDs that were the same as topics in the project where they were being pasted. Since IDs must always be unique HM updates everything with additional numbers to avoid collisions. You could avoid that by changing the IDs of the topics you are going to insert before pasting.

[Dave Gehman]

That means that the topics you pasted in had IDs that were the same as topics in the project where they were being pasted.

Oddly, in the receiving project there were no topics with any topic, title, or ID even similar to the topics or titles being pasted in from the donor project, let alone any existing exactly-named topics. These were topics around a completely new functionality of the product we're documenting, and of course, completely new text.

Is 8 similar to 7 in that we could open multiple instances of H+M -- and is there a capability of pasting across two instances? By that I mean, can we select and copy topics in instance A and then paste them into instance B? If so I might experiment to see if our cutting-and-pasting results in the same problem.

[Tim Green]

Is 8 similar to 7 in that we could open multiple instances of H+M -- and is there a capability of pasting across two instances? By that I mean, can we select and copy topics in instance A and then paste them into instance B? If so I might experiment to see if our cutting-and-pasting results in the same problem.

Absolutely. That is also the easiest way to do it.

[Dave Gehman]

Good.

But it still doesn't explain how the cut/pasted topics received numerical suffixes where there were no topics or IDs like them in the receiving project...

[Tim Green]

But it still doesn't explain how the cut/pasted topics received numerical suffixes where there were no topics or IDs like them in the receiving project...

Is the Topic ID getting the numerical suffix or only the <Title> Tag: field in Topic Options? If it's the latter it is a known quirk that is going to be changed. However, if the ID is getting changed then there is a topic file with that ID in the target project somewhere. It may only be in the Topic Files section somewhere, without a TOC entry.

[Dave Gehman]

Sounds like the soon-to-be fixed quirk. Thanks.