Potential pitfalls and how to avoid them

HelpIDs

Every page has a HelpID. This is a number and is unique to each page, but it is possible to experience a conflict if you register a slave project in the "Mutli-Project Register" and then reference a topic from it. For example, if you have a topic with a HelpID of 30054 and you add a referenced topic with the same HelpID, Fast-Help will automatically change the HelpID so that it is unique, to avoid the conflict. This may not suit you, as you may specifically reference that HelpID from an application.

To avoid conflicts, it is useful to use a range of HelpIDs that are unique to each project. If you select "Project | Project Settings" you will see the "Last Used HelpIDs" section. When you next add a topic, that topic would take the number below and add one. The range below starts with 40,000 for topics and 800 for popups.

For example, if you have two slave projects and a master project, then you could use the following ranges:

Project	Topic HelpID Range	Popup HelpID Range
Master	50000	1200
Slave2	40000	800
Slave1	30000	200

This would give the Slave1 project 10,000 topics before it came into the 40,000 range, and give 600 popups. Obviously if you anticipate a greater number of popups and topics then please increase the ranges as you per your needs.

ContextStrings

Each page requires a unique string that is used for the file name when saving to Website Help and HtmlHelp. This also needs to be unique. One way to ensure it is unique is to automatically prefix each ContextString with a unique prefix. For example, select "Project | Project Settings" and click on the "ContextString" tab and set the Prefix field to "SLAVE1_", or use something that makes sense to you. When you then add a new topic called "Introduction Page", the ContextString would be automatically set to "SLAVE1_IntroductionPage". This would likely make all pages created in this project, unique to other projects. It is generally a good idea to use short strings in the prefix, such as AJ_, or HK_. These letters could be short for the project name or the person who is authoring that project.