SAB 5.1 replacement of books especially additional books

We are anticipating regular updates of apps in different scripts in the course of time. Bible books are replaced by a new fresh set and also additional books (sometimes more then 50 in one App). These additional books are in HTML. IN SAB you can Add books, but you cannot replace books which have the same sfm or html filename. For the sfm (in our case the actual bible books) this is not so much of a problem because SAB will filter out the bookname and its abbreviation and those fields will be filed automatically in SAB under the BOOK NAMES Tab.
But for the HTML books, all the information (Abbreviationd and Bookname, Group and Subgroup) will be gone and you have to redo this again and again with every update of books … as we anticipate and already have begun to do. It would be very convenient if this information could be maintained from the previous version of the file with the similar name … or is there already a way to do this …?

If you click on the collection name in the left pane, then highlight all the books in the right pane you can right click and select Update from Original Source

So if you are replacing HTML files replace them in the source folder and use the same name.

Thank you Ian, my roots are somehow still in DOS where you had no left and right mouse click. Happy to hear about this …
but what is the ORIGINAL SOURCE? Is that the C01 and all its subfolder like B001 etc. or is that a map somewhere on my Mac which until now was a different one every time I “updated” but not in the way I should have done it?
Sorry for keeping you busy …

The original source is the file you first imported into the app builder. SAB makes a copy of that file and uses the copy.
So to renew what you have if you make changes in the original file, you then can update the SAB files from the originals. This is designed to work from Paratext sources, but works for other files also.

Yes, thank you for this explanation. It works.

Always good to know I am not talking through my hat.

I come back to this ORIGINAL SOURCE system for updating …
Is there a way to tell SAB that I changed the name of original source folder and even file names … my first choice for these names was not so well planned)

You have two choices:

  1. Delete your original books and re-import from the new location. But if you have settings modifications per book (not the norm) this may not be desirable as you would lose those settings.
  2. Close SAB. Make a backup of your project .appdef file. Open the .appdef file in a text editor and go to
/app-definition/books/book/source

If there are more than one collection then your will have multiple books to choose from. Then in each collection you will normally have many books. Each one like below.

    <book id="MAT">
      <filename>41MATWEB.SFM</filename>
      <source>D:\My Paratext Projects\WEB\41MATWEB.SFM</source>
      <name>Matthew</name>
      <abbrev>Mat</abbrev>
      <group>NT</group>
      <sub-group>Gospel</sub-group>
    </book>

Change the old path there to the new path. I am assuming the file name has not changed.

Save the file.

Then reopen SAB and do your refresh from source.

Although this did not work as I expected (probably I made a mistake somewhere), I thank you for the clear explanation and will keep that in my file.

Meanwhile I have redone it manually and it all stands as it should for quick orderly updates in the future.