Oxygen XML Forum

Hi

The UI Engineer has been tasked to create what he refers to as "help balloons". These balloons are known to others as context sensitive help that's launched from a dialog box by clicking the popular question mark - result is content displayed in a new window. I jumped on to the bandwagon for a number of reasons.

He wants to store the topic HTML in an XML file. The HTML is retrieved by parsing the XML for a specific tag associated with a UI dialog box. When the question mark for help is clicked, the XML is retrieved from GWT RequestBuilder - passing in a URL to the file. The XML is then parsed and the content associated with the tag is inserted into the help popup window.

I'm still pretty new to DITA. I'm wondering if I can create the XML file using resourceid in the prolog of each topic intended for CSH. I want to use the content already authored in DITA for the CSH.

Is this a reasonable idea or should I be thinking of a better way?

Thanks!
Diana

Hi,

dchapman wrote:I'm still pretty new to DITA. I'm wondering if I can create the XML file using resourceid in the prolog of each topic intended for CSH. I want to use the content already authored in DITA for the CSH.

I am not sure how you plan to use the resourceid value from a topic to read the particular help content needed by the CSH context. Maybe you want to generate first the HTML output from all DITA XML topics, before deploying/starting the GWT application, and locate at runtime the resource ID of a particular CSH context in the generated HTML pages by matching it against the resourceid values in the HTML pages?

Oxygen provides a DITA Map XHTML transformation and also a DITA Map Webhelp one but the resourceid element is ignored in the current Oxygen version (the content of the resourceid element is not passed yet to the HTML/Webhelp output pages).


Regards,
Sorin