Re: [austechwriter] Merging of Framemaker files on Clearcase

[Chris Despopoulos <cud@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Just to clarify...

I believe Hedley is talking about two different IDs - there's the unique 
ID and the table/aframe ID.  The unique ID is used by Maker to track any 
document object persistently across sessions.  I believe MIF is loose 
about that - if you have a duplicate UID in a MIF document then it 
should notice that and create a new UID for the conflicting objetc.  If 
you have some data repository that makes use of these UIDs, then that 
will be hosed.  But I'm not aware of this use for UIDs in actual 
practice...  I don't believe it's very common.

On the other hand, table and aframe IDs are used to identify the 
location in a flow for a table or aframe.  These IDs are serial - tbl1, 
tbl2, tbl3, etc.  I have received generated MIF files that get the 
sequence mixed up - the result is missing tables in the document.  So, 
for example, if you have two tables in your MIF with the same ID, one of 
them is likely to never appear in your document.  

I personally view CVS (or other source control) on MIF with dread.  I 
would rather think about SGML - it's safer.

cud

>Because the <Unique ...> tags occupy a single line, the change of the ID is
>treated as a conflict.  VSS recognizes the conflict, asks if conflicts have
>been resolved (to which you lyingly reply 'yes' even though you haven't
>resolved conflicts), and then applies the IDs from one of the files to the 
>merged result.
>
>Admittedly, I have tested this only on short documents of three or four
>pages, to which I made substantial changes (paras, chars, tables, graphics) 
>before merging.  In all cases FrameMaker opened the merged result without
>complaint.
>
>What could be problematic is that different paragraphs or tables in the two
>branches have the same IDs.  Since the ID of a table is used in the anchor 
>marker to point to the 'real' table located at the beginning of the file, 
>there is a potential for the anchor marker to point to two different tables 
>with the same ID in the merged result.
>
>Hence my caveat to obtain an evaluation copy of FrameMaker to put your
>repository manager (ClearCase, CVS, VSS, or whatever) before committing 
>(get it?) to purchase.
>
>If all else fails you can use FrameMaker's document comparison to merge
>branched files.
>
>Regards,
>Hedley
>



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