Drag-and-drop links from DITA Maps Manager

[jelovirt]

Use case:

1. User has DITA Maps Manager and a DITA document open in Text mode.
2. User creates an xref element in the DITA document, and adds an empty href attribute.
3. User drags a topic from Maps Manager to the href attribute
4. Oxygen fills in the href attribute with the value of the dragged topicref href.

The value should be the relative URL the the topicref target if the topicref is a local file; for absolute URLs the whole URL should be added.

[Radu]

Hi Jarno,

We'll consider this for a new version of Oxygen.
In the meantime you can right click the topic ref in the DITA Maps Manager, select "Edit Properties" and copy the "href" text from there.

Regards,
Radu

[jelovirt]

Currently I'm using the exact same workaround you suggested, but it takes more time and doesn't create correct relative URLs if the two files are not in the same folder.

To take this feature further, if the user has

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<p>See chapter </p>

And you drag the topicref to the character position after the word "chapter", Oxygen could detect that this in this drop context the desired effect is to create an xref element,

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<p>See chapter <xref href="topic.dita"></xref></p>

and place the cursor in the xref element. If the drop context is related-links element, a link element should be created. When the drop context is a an attribute or an element that does not allow either xref or link, simply the resolved URL should be added as text.

This same functionality could also be applied to Authoring mode.

[jannylun]

I agree with jelovirt, this functionality would be handy. I'd also like to add that a similar request:

1. User has project view and a DITA topic open in text/author view.
2. User drags an image into a text/author view.
3. Oxygen detects if an <image> element is allowed and adds:

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<image href='image.jpg'/>

[Radu]

Hi Jan,

I added this as a feature request for a future version.

Regards,
Radu

[Radu]

Hi,

There will be some improvements in Oxygen 12 for this.
How things will probably work:
1) For the Text page:
Drop from the Oxygen Project tree or DITA Maps manager to the Text page will insert the relative location at the caret position, so if you drop in an empty href the relative location will get inserted.

2) For the Author page:
Drop from the Oxygen Project tree or DITA Maps manager to the Author page will insert an element (for DITA for example: if the dropped resource is an image file, an image gets inserted, else an xref or link get inserted depending on the context). This support is for DITA, Docbook, TEI, XHTML (depending on the framework specific elements get inserted). If you are editing another framework, the behavior will be like in the Text page.

When dropping from an external resource (eg: Windows Explorer) and the file is an image the same algorithm will apply. If the file is not an image, it will get opened in Oxygen.

Another Oxygen 12 feature related to linking will be the ability to select an entire element (which has an ID set) in the Author page, Copy to clipboard and then at the destination you will have special "Paste as reference" or "Paste as content reference".

Regards,
Radu