xml editor

[MichaelDa]

Hi.

I have a use case that I am looking for a solution, but I do not know if it is possible in Oxygen Author. This is regarding WebHelp output in Author.

By default, if I reference the same topic (e.g. topic.xml) multiple times in a Ditamap, and then create WebHelp output, one instance of the output HTML file (topic.html) is created, with multiple parent topic links.

This is a problem in the following use case:

We have product installation instructions that span many topics. However, we have multiple installation scenarios to accommodate various conditions in customers' environments (different O/S versions, database software, etc.) We have one set of DITA topics that we put together in various orders based on the particular installation scenario. So, for example, if you have 10 instructional topics, Installation Scenario A might have Topics 1, 2, 3, 7, and 10, whereas Installation Scenario B might have Topics 2, 4, 5, and 6. These various scenarios are then compiled in one Ditamap and output in one single WebHelp project.

In this example, the problem arises if a user is looking at Topic 2. Topic 2 would have two parent topic links: one for Installation Scenario A, and one for Installation Scenario B. It is not obvious to users which parent topic link to click. (There are breadcrumb links, but we are finding that users do not understand the difference between these intuitively.) If they click the wrong parent topic link, they end up in the wrong Installation Scenario, and they are then lost.

What I want to be able to do is, when there are multiple references to a topic in a Ditamap, create multiple instances of the HTML output file for that topic, so that each HTML topic instance has only one parent topic link.

Is this possible with Oxygen Author?

[Radu]

Hi Michael,

The WebHelp plugin provided by Oxygen to the DITA Open Toolkit is largely based on the classic XHTML transformation.
We have similar problems in our user manual:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/ug-oxygen/index.html?q=/doc/ug-oxygen/topics/editor-variables.html

But there are two valid workarounds:

1) For each reference create a new topic file which makes a conref to the original topic file.

2) When you make the topicref in the DITA Map on the <topicref> element you can set a copy-to attribute which was designed for just such cases, you can read about it more in the DITA 1.2 specs:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/os/spec/langref/topicref.html#topicref

What we've found out is that in order for the processing to be correct using copy-to, the value of the attribute needs to also contain the same folder path as the original value, like:

Code: Select all

<topicref href="concepts/springFlowers.xml" copy-to="concepts/springFlowers2.xml">
.....


Hope this helps.
Regards,
Radu