Duplicating an entire Book (including Topics) with XML

When you duplicate a book, it makes a copy of the original book, and includes all of its topics without duplicating them.

This means that because exactly the same topics are used in both Books, any changes you make to a topic will occur in both books. So, to change a topic in the new book but not in the original, you also need to duplicate that topic and make your changes to the new topic.

Many people have asked why we don't duplicate the topics at the same time, or if there is an option that will allow them to do so.

First, you need to remember that Author-it has been designed as a single sourcing tool, and one of the main strengths in this approach is object reuse. Duplicating entire Books means you end up with multiple copies of a document - which more often than not leads to duplication of information that could have been reused.

Of course, there are instances where there is a valid requirement for duplicating a book and all it's topics. Probably the most common is when you want to create a skeleton book, with standard topic headings and boilerplate material but where a large amount of topic content varies from one document to the next. A typical requirement could include producing regular reports and requests for tender that always have an identical structure of sections, chapters and topics, but share little (if any) of the same content from one to the next.

Obviously, you can duplicate the book and then individually duplicate each topic but this quickly becomes very tedious.

So what other approaches can you take?

If you're using the Enterprise edition, you can use the XML Export/Import to duplicate the book...

How to Duplicate an entire Book with XML

Use the Advanced Object Search to identify all objects used by the Book. Author-it includes the actual Book itself in the search results.
Sort by object type by clicking the column header directly above the book icon in the object list, and select the objects you want to duplicate.

Note: Don't choose any of the Media or Style objects listed in the results, as you won't want to duplicate these.
Right click and choose XML > Save to file. Give the file an appropriate name that will help you identify its purpose at a later stage. In a multiuser environment you'll probably want to save the file to a shared area so others in your team also have access to it.
From the main menu choose Import > From an AuthorIT XML File and select the XML file.
The XML Object Mapping wizard appears, and by default will be set to overwrite the original objects.
Select all objects, then click the [...] button on the Mapped Object column of the first selected object.
Note: You need to click the Mapped Object column, and not the Description or Code column when multi-selecting. Otherwise the objects are selected, but the [...] button won't appear and you won't be able to set the mapping for all objects at once.

The Select an Object dialog displays.
Choose (New Object)
Choose Next. The Object Relation Mapping wizard appears, automatically matching up the relationships the objects being imported have.
Choose Next to start the import.

The wizard automatically takes care of linking all duplicated objects, included embedded topics, hyperlinks, file objects etc. For example, if you've used the import to duplicate a topic, a link used in that topic to another topic, and the target topic, Author-it figures it all out automatically and uses the new hyperlink, and not the original one.