Best file structure for DITA

[user234]

Hello

What is the best method to store DITAMAPS and their TOPICS?
Can you expand on the sentence:
"The ideal file structure for a DITA project is to have ditamaps at the root level of the documentation repository folder, and content topics stored in sub-folders down from the root. This structure ensures that topicref links to content always move down the tree structure. As ditamaps are an informational superset of topics, having ditamaps in a superfolder is a logical approach."

Can you post a visual of the file path structure? Thanks,
Natalie.

[Radu]

Hi Natalie,

Your quote is from the "DITA Style Guide". It's a book written by DITA consultant Tony Self and hosted on our web site. So it is not content produced by Oxygen's technical writers or content part of the Oxygen user's manual.
At some point I created on the Oxygen XML GitHub organization a DITA project exemplifying some best practices:

https://github.com/oxygenxml/dita-proje ... -practices

The Oxygen's user's guide in DITA format is another example:

https://github.com/oxygenxml/userguide/tree/master/DITA

I would suggest storing the main DITA Map in the top folder, you can store submaps separately in a "maps" folder, have separate folders for "images", "filters" and then maybe try to have subfolders based on the various major components of your applications (we have not yet applied this last one in our user's manual). For example if Oxygen can be split into three main parts: "XML Editor", "XSLT Debugger", "Database Explorer", you would have a subfolder for each. In each subfolder you could store topics/concepts/tasks. An older approach was to store tasks separately in a "tasks" folder, concepts separately in a "concepts" folder but I thing this approach is not that used anymore.

Regards,
Radu

[user234]

Thank You!