Advice: Reorganizing DITA File Structure

[thedantanner]

Greetings, all. I'm tasked with a project, and I'd appreciate advice from the forum on the best way to approach the job. I'm pretty new to DITA, but have plenty of IT experience. Here's a rundown...

Currently, all of our DITA files are stored in a single file folder. There are over eight thousand files consisting of .xml, .ditamap, .jpg, and .png files. The only real structure to this is that each filename begins with a section number to indicate which section of the ditamap the file belongs in. For example:

01topicfile.xml, 01imagefile.jpg, 03anothertopic.xml, 03anotherimagefile.jpg, 03anotherimagefile02.jpg, and so on.

I am going to take all of these files, and move them to a file with structure, organized by sections, with separate folders for the bookmaps and section ditamaps. Here's what the finished product should look like:

+REPOSITORY
---+01
-----+01images
---+02
-----+02images
---+03
-----+03images
---+bookmaps
---+sectionditamaps

Obviously, when I make this move, I'm going to have orphaned files all over the place. I've started my initial testing, and have found that the cleanup is going to be immense. So I wonder if some of you might have some time-saving suggestions on how to move these files into the file new structure. The tools available to me are the full Oxygen 18.0 suite, as well as Adobe Framemaker, which I use generally only use for layout work.

I appreciate any advice as I slowly shed my newbie status!
Cheers,
Dan

[Radu]

Hi Dan,

Right now we do not have in Oxygen support to move a set of resources to a folder and automatically update all references to them. We will at some point and I added your use case to the opened issue.
In the meantime, after you move the files maybe you can use our "Find/Replace in Files" tool with regular expression support to fix those broken references after the files have been moved.

Regards,
Radu

[thedantanner]

Thanks, Radu. Creative use of the find/replace functionality has proven to be the key to the speed and success of the project.

[sorin_carbunaru]

Hello,

I just wanted to let you know that in the newly released oXygen 19.0 we added the DITA Master Files Support, that allows you to easily move and rename resources (including non-topic files) in the Project view, and also update the references to those resources.

You can find some more information at https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/ ... r%2Cfiles.

All the best wishes,
Sorin Carbunaru
oXygen XML