Compound Documents

[france.baril@ixiasoft.com]

Following the discussion on compound documents, I wanted to share how I used DITA in a process to publish technical documentation from non-DITA xml sources.

I have to document Web Services (WS) in my current project. My basic sources of information are WSDLs and comments extracted from C# code (method, parameter descriptions) that are in a non-DITA XML format.

To document WS Operations I transform my WSDLs into multiple DITA reference documents (one for each operation and one for a general overview of the WS), and I add the operation and parameter descriptions from the C# xml documentation files. I also automated the process of buiding a DITA map from WSDL files.

I'm about to use a similar process for documenting the XML schemas used by the WS.

Basically, my point is that using DITA is a also good way to put together pieces of information from non-DITA sources. It could be interesting to propose DITA as a way to solve some of the issues related to creating compound outputs.

France