Attributes Question

[thedantanner]

I'm still young to DITA so please forgive this amateur-ish question...

I'm wondering if there is an attribute which can be used to store somewhat generic information. Here's what I'm trying to accomplish. If someone knows a good way to accomplish this, please feel free to share.

I need to be able to generate a report (in access) which tells me all of the languages that a single topic file has been translated to. I figured the best way to do this was in some attribute at the topic level. I've hunted and hunted and haven't found an attribute that actually has this purpose, but again... I'm new-ish and there are thousands of attributes to look through, so I might have missed it.

I assume this is something a CMS can accomplish (which our company isn't going to invest in right now) so how does a CMS do it?

Any help is appreciated.
D

[sorin_carbunaru]

Hello,

I think you should post this scenario on the Yahoo DITA Users List too: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/dita-users/info. Maybe there you can find people who had similar requirements and see what they did.

One possible idea would be to create a DITA specialization that adds a custom attribute to the vocabulary, and use that one for your purpose.

But I have a question: couldn't you determine the languages that a topic has been translated to by examining the file system on your computer? For example, in the "English" folder you have the "test.dita" topic, also in the "German" folder, but in the "French" folder you don't... Then you can conclude that the topic was not translated into French...

And because we are talking about the process of translating DITA topics, I thought that you might be interested in the "DITA Translation Package Builder" add-on for oXygen, that can be installed from: https://github.com/oxygenxml/oxygen-dit ... ge-builder (in oXygen go to Help -> Install new add-ons...). You can read some information about it at the following link: https://github.com/oxygenxml/oxygen-dit ... /README.md.

All the best,
Sorin Carbunaru
oXygen XML