Generating reuse components

[anonymous1]

Hello,

I am trying to generate reuse components for our migration to Oxygen and I have the following questions:

• What is the most generic DTD declaration for my reusable components? I do not know what I will generate a priori, so I'd rather be permissive.
• Is it possible to create a conref linking to the ComponentDefinition element, so that I can automatically get the whole content of my reusable component directly or do I have to create a range attribute and assign an id to each child of ComponentDefinition?]

Thank you!

[Radu]

Hi Arthur,

Please see some answers below:

What is the most generic DTD declaration for my reusable components? I do not know what I will generate a priori, so I'd rather be permissive.

Our special "Create Reusable Component" action (which I think you are using) creates a small DTD specialization directly in the DITA content which refers to the original DOCTYPE of the topic from which the element came from. Usually reusable elements should be placed in plain topics (with the topic DTD public IDs).

[*]Is it possible to create a conref linking to the ComponentDefinition element, so that I can automatically get the whole content of my reusable component directly or do I have to create a range attribute and assign an id to each child of ComponentDefinition?

Our specific "Create Reusable Component" action can only save one component per file. It's mostly indented for beginners. Usually when reusing content in a DITA project you can create your own DITA topic which has inside it various elements which can be reused. You can have a table which on the first column contains in each cell a reused element and on the second column has a small description for that element, description which is used by the tech writer to find out more about where the element should be used (like some kind of metadata).
Also I would suggest using content key references instead of key references.

My DITA Reuse Strategies blog post should have more details about how to best reuse:

http://blog.oxygenxml.com/2015/11/dita- ... orial.html

Regards,
Radu

[anonymous1]

Hi Radu,

Thank you for your answer. I didn't clearly specify that I'm generating these reusable component on my own, not using Oxygen.
I guess I'll create basic topics instead to hold my reusable contents though. Thank you for the pointer.