Does Oxygen XML Have the Feature like WebHelp Document Version Switch

[felixliu]

Hi, I am wondering whether there is a way to implement documentation version switch (for example, this documentation site has a version switch in the upper-left corner) on the WebHelp output?
Thanks.

[Costin]

Hi felixliu,

Bu default, Oxygen WebHelp generates only a single version of the output.
As there is no out-of-the-box support for managing different output versions, this could most probably done through a customization which you should develop on your own.

We already have a feature request logged in our internal tracking system to add this functionality in a future version, so I've just added your vote for it and we will notify this thread when/if a new implementation becomes available.

Regards,
Costin

[felixliu]

Hi felixliu,

Bu default, Oxygen WebHelp generates only a single version of the output.
As there is no out-of-the-box support for managing different output versions, this could most probably done through a customization which you should develop on your own.

We already have a feature request logged in our internal tracking system to add this functionality in a future version, so I've just added your vote for it and we will notify this thread when/if a new implementation becomes available.

Regards,
Costin

Got it. Thanks.

[InspectorSpacetime]

As a workaround, I've created a dropdpwn menu in the header using the after.top_menu XHTML fragment. The XHTML file includes a map-xpath macro that picks up the current version defined in the map's othermeta element, and displays that as the menu's title. The dropdown items are links to the other versions.

Of course the problem is that the version links are static and always only point to the main page of the different versions. Basically it would be possible to use the same mechanism to define a different version target for each topic, but for a large doc set that's a lot of work, and not an optimal solution.

[chrispitude]

Hi InspectorSpacetime,

That's a pretty cool solution for the global doc set. Nicely done!

For the per-topic version switching idea, how would you handle situations where a topic was added/deleted/moved/reorganized between versions?

[InspectorSpacetime]

Hi InspectorSpacetime,

That's a pretty cool solution for the global doc set. Nicely done!

For the per-topic version switching idea, how would you handle situations where a topic was added/deleted/moved/reorganized between versions?

Hi Chris,

To be honest, I don't know.

I guess the linking should work so that if a topic exists in one version but not in another, the user is directed to the main page when trying to switch versions. But how to accomplish that technically is very much beyond my abilities.

[alin]

Hello,

You can use the Context-Sensitive Help functionality to determine the URLs of the current topic from other versions.
All you need to know is the base URL of the published output corresponding to the target version and the ID of the topic and you can build the URL as follows:

Code: Select all

{version-X-base_URL}/cshelp.html?contextId=topicID

If the topic with the referenced ID does not exist in the target version then the user is redirected to the main page of the WebHelp output.

Regards,
Alin