Hi Teo, thanks for the response, but I’m not Martin, and I have no idea who Martin is. I found this request because I have a similar issue, and I agree that it's spot on.
As I mentioned in my op, I’m working on a very large legacy doc collection with thousands of files and hundreds of maps, most of them nested. It was developed over decades by multiple writing teams who took various approaches to content organization. It will take me time to assemble their past patchwork of ideas into a clear mental model. So what I need today is the ability to instantly do two things:
1. Make a file...from any context...the currently selected file in my project (and hence in Project view).
2. For any .dita file, identify all maps (primary and nested) that reference that file.
Rationale for item 1:
- The ‘Link with Editor’ button solves part of the problem. But there’s a basic conceptual muddiness in OxygenXML around the relationship of perspectives, views, tabs, windows, files, and selection, such that in some cases, it takes multiple steps and a context shift to ensure that a file is currently selected in my project. The fact that Project view can be closed, auto-hidden, covered by another view (such as Git Staging), or undocked and located on another monitor, adds to the issue. A third problem is that ‘Link with Editor’ is not easy to discover, infer from its label (think of how many times you use the word ‘link’ in your product), find from a top-level search on oxygenxml.com, or find within the in-product help…try it and you’ll see what I mean. The UI button…one of many combos of arrows in the default Editor view…faces similar challenges. So rather than have my entire workflow depend on whether a small, iconically obscure, confusingly named button in the corner of two views…which might be closed, hidden, covered by other views, or floating as a standalone window (also possibly covered by other windows)…is toggled correctly, it seems reasonable to get everything I need from a contextual menu item.
Rationale for item 2:
- No colleagues I know who also manage large doc collections use DITA Maps Manager unless absolutely necessary…it’s too onerous to set context correctly and too slow to load. Moreover, I should not need to switch perspectives or open and configure multiple views to see the simple and essential relationship between a .dita file and one or more maps. This relationship should be available by default and easily viewable for any selected file without any action on my part. Alternatively, if for some reason a visible file-to-map relationship can’t be a default part of a standard Editor window, a context menu item should show me the primary and nested map relationship on demand…something like this:
- myfile.dita appears in:
- one.ditamap; nested in a.ditamap > b.ditamap (> c.ditamap …)
- (two.ditamap; nested in …)
Can we accomplish the same today? Maybe, but the most obvious ways I’ve been able to find feel slow, clunky, and old. It might just be a knowledge gap on my part…but if there’s a quicker and more efficient way, it’s not easily discoverable. So unless I’m just missing something, I concur with Martin’s contextual menu request…which seems fast and reasonable.