How to incorporate child ditamaps under a parent ditamap...?

[jnielsen]

What is the proper procedure for adding a ditamap as a child "topic" to another ditamap? Basically I wanted to break up each major section or chapter of a document we have created into several ditamaps (one per section/chapter) and then use one overall unifying ditmap to place the others under as child nodes. When I try to build such a ditamap for PDF it creates a 4-page blank slate except for headings like "Contents" and page number. Is this an issue with it being called by a <topicref> or is it something else? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Josh

[Radu]

Hi Josh,

Usually from the DITA Maps Manager View you can choose to add a Topic Reference and in the dialog choose the DITA Map to refer and set a navigation title to it.

The generated XML code should be something like:

Code: Select all

 <topicref href="hierarchy.ditamap" navtitle="Title" locktitle="yes" format="ditamap"/>

Both the PDF2 and PDF transformations seemed to incorporate OK the content of the referenced map.

Regards,
Radu

[jnielsen]

Hi Radu,

I have tried that and added a nav title. For simplicity I was just testing with a single ditamap "subtopic". The entirety of the encompassing ditamap looks like:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE map PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Map//EN" "http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/OS/dtd/map.dtd">

<map title="DITA Topic Map">

    <topicref href="Resources.ditamap" navtitle="Resources" locktitle="yes" format="ditamap"/>

</map>

All that it does is generate those 4-blank pages with the header "Contents" and some page numbers. Something is obviously being overlooked here. I am using the newest version of Oxygen (version 10). Should I try to send my files to you so you can test it out on your machine, or do you know what the problem might be?

No success with both a PDF and PDF2 build. Same results.

~Josh

[Radu]

Hi Josh,

From a simple sample project that I tried to transform I noticed no problems so if you have a sample project, you can send it over to our support email.

Regards,
Radu

[jnielsen]

Ok, I feel stupid now. I figured it out. The ditamap had spaces in the file name (I've made this mistake before). I just had to look at the output log a little more thoroughly and I saw where the errors were coming from. Works great now. Thanks for your time!

P.S. In future versions will the requirements for no white space in file names be removed or improved upon at all? Just wondering.

~Josh

[Radu]

Hi Josh,

We fixed this issue about two months ago so when Oxygen 10.1 comes out in about one month you can try it out.

Regards,
Radu

[jnielsen]

Terrific. Thank you.

~Josh