Reverse Paste Sequence / Selection Sequence Missing

[mmatlock]

Hello, I hope I am posting in the correct area, and that I am not duplicating a question previously asked. I did a search and did not see anything at first glance.
Here is the situation - at my company, we use oXygen Author to create very long service procedures of the form:

Code: Select all

<task><title> Removal</title>
<taskbody>
<steps>
1. <step> <cmd>Remove part A.</cmd></step>
2. <step> <cmd>Remove part B.</cmd></step>
3. <step> <cmd>Remove part C.</cmd></step>
and so on for tens to hundreds of steps. 
24. <step> <cmd>Remove part X.</cmd></step>
25. <step> <cmd>Remove part Y.</cmd></step>
26. <step> <cmd>Remove part Z.</cmd></step>
</steps>
</taskbody>
</task>

So that is for removal, for installation:

Code: Select all

<task><title> Installation</title>
<taskbody>
<steps>
1. <step> <cmd>Install part Z.</cmd></step>
2. <step> <cmd>Install part Y.</cmd></step>
3. <step> <cmd>Install part X.</cmd></step>
and so on until... 
24. <step> <cmd>Install part C.</cmd></step>
25. <step> <cmd>Install part B.</cmd></step>
26. <step> <cmd>Install part A.</cmd></step>
</steps>
</taskbody>
</task>

We were previously using oXygen Author 21, and to simplify the process, we would first create the Removal task. For the Installation task, we would create an empty task, select the steps of the removal sequence in reverse order using the ctrl key, copy the selected steps, and then paste the steps into the empty task. The pasted steps would be in the order selected, effectively reverse sequence. We would need to change "Remove" to "Install" and some clean up, but it made what would be a long task into short work.
We just upgraded to oXygen Author 23, and this functionality no longer exists.
Was this a feature removed from Author, or does a Preferences parameter need to be set?
If removed, is there a workaround? If a parameter, which would it be?
Thank you very much

[Radu]

Hi,

This obeying of the order in which the selection was made was not really an intended feature, sometime before Oxygen 23.0 was released we received a complaint about it:
post59658.html#p59658
then we checked how other applications (like Microsoft Word for example) handle such cases and most applications seem to sort the selected content in document order. Although there are indeed other few applications which preserve the selection order.
So we implemented this document order sorting of the selection in Oxygen 23 and there is no setting for it.
I added an internal issue to add a setting for it but I'm not sure if we'll do that or not, it would be quite of an obscured setting useful to few people and hard to discover.
If you want I can try to create a custom Author action which reverse sorts the child elements of a certain parent element and give you some instructions on how to set it up. Have you customized the DITA editing framework until now? Add for example custom actions, CSS styles?

Regards,
Radu

[mmatlock]

Thank you for the quick response Radu!
Your efforts would be greatly appreciated!
I personally do not know how to customize the DITA editing framework, add custom actions, or edit CSS styles, but there are people here that do.
Please do create the Author action and provide the instructions to set it up.
Thank you so very much!

[Radu]

Hi Matt,

There are some steps about implementing a custom action using Javascript for the DITA framework on the Oxygen XML Blog:
https://blog.oxygenxml.com/topics/custo ... based.html

I uploaded some Javascript code which reverses the children of the current element. It should work if the caret is either directly inside the <steps> element or if the <steps> element is fully selected (using the Outline for example) before calling the action:

https://github.com/oxygenxml/javascript ... iblings.js

Regards,
Radu

[mmatlock]

Thank you very, very much Radu !