Correctly show conref pushreplace in Author view

[jorahood]

Hi, I would like to see Oxygen Author view understand how to display conref elements where the conaction is pushreplace.

[Radu]

Hi Andy,

I actually added this is a feature request to our issues list after our meeting at DITA NA.
But we haven't yet made any improvements so if you have a clear idea about how you would like conref pushing to be displayed in Author maybe you can send some sketches (or altered screenshots) to our support email address (support at oxygenxml dot com).

Regards,
Radu

[jorahood]

Well, my request is pretty simple really. Oxygen's current behavior for viewing conrefs in Author mode is to pull the conref target element and display it in place of the conref source element. I want it to do the reverse when it sees a conaction="pushreplace" attribute: push the conref source element in place of the conref target element.

Thanks,
Andy

[juliovaz]

It would also be beneficial for Author to display pushbefore and pushafter correctly too. Current behavior shows the element that's the target of the conref/conkeyref but the target topic shows no indication of the resolution. At the very least, you should see everything resolved correctly when you open the resolved map in the editor.

[Radu]

Hi Julio,

What version of Oxygen are you using?
In Oxygen 16.1 we made some small improvements on rendering push replace and mark elements. For example the target element is no longer shown in the source file. Also the dialog used to insert a content reference can be used to insert a push replace or mark.

We still do not show the expanded content in the place where it will replace the target element.
There are several problems with this approach:

1) When a certain DITA topic is opened, for each element which has with a certain @id, we would need to search in the entire DITA Map scope to see if there is another topic which pushes content on or around it. So we would need to have some kind of caching and metadata for each DITA Map project to know all conref pushes which are made in it and to invalidate that cache accordingly.

2) How would you represent a push replace in an editor? You would still need to present the old content of the element besides the new content which gets pushed upon it but somehow signal that the old content will not be used.

3) It might be the case that one or more topics might push content to the same topic element and depending on the applied DITAVAL filter only the content pushed by one of them would actually appear in the published output. How would you represent this in an editor?

Regards,
Radu

[jasowen]

Hi. Is there any update that you could provide as to the status of enhancing the display of content that is pushed into a topic in Author mode? The challenges that Radu listed seem pretty significant. That said, I have been seeing an increasing number of use cases over the last few years where conref/conkeyref push provide the best (and sometimes only) solution and not being able to see pushed content in Author mode is one of the more significant barriers to implementing a push based solution. At my current organization, we are looking at the likelihood of using conkeyref push as the only viable solution to enable content reuse for some of our content structures. If you could provide an update as to the status of the original request on the roadmap, that would be helpful.
Regards,
Jason Owen

[Radu]

Hi Jason,

I added your details to the opened issue but I cannot provide a roadmap for it. We have not started working or estimating its feasibility.

Regards,
Radu