As you say, I think it is editor customization, and that depends on the editor. In Arbortext Editor, you can get what amounts to a combobox, with free form text entry in addition to a list of common choices. You do this by defining an attribute value space to be the union of an enumeration (list of specific items) and a text pattern that defines exactly what you can type. For example: <xs:simpleType name="vendor"> <xs:union> <!-- TYPICAL VALUES TO CHOOSE FROM --> <xs:simpleType> <xs:restriction base="xs:string"> <xs:enumeration value="linux" /> <xs:enumeration value="mac" /> <xs:enumeration value="windows" /> </xs:restriction> </xs:simpleType> <!-- STRING PATTERN IF TYPED MANUALLY --> <xs:simpleType> <xs:restriction base="xs:string"> <xs:pattern value="(linux|mac|windows)((;(linux|mac|windows))*)?" /> </xs:restriction> </xs:simpleType> </xs:union> </xs:simpleType> I don't know if other editors would handle this in a similar way. From: Cramer, David W (David) [mailto:dcramer@motive.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2011 4:58 AM
To: Bob Stayton; docbook@lists.oasis-open.org; Kate.Wringe@sybase.com
Subject: RE: [docbook] More than one value for an attribute. As soon as I hit send, I woke up a little and realized that what you really want is a dialog box in the editor (launched by a button or whatever) that lets the writer click one or more checkboxes for each value, then when they click ok, it turns the selected values into a comma delimited list as the attribute value. For my xrefstyle case, I’d use radio buttons instead of check boxes. The user is still free to edit the attribute value manually. You could also customize the xslts to check the list of values to make sure nothing unsupported was entered. David From: Cramer, David W (David) [mailto:dcramer@motive.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2011 6:43 AM
To: Bob Stayton; docbook@lists.oasis-open.org; Kate.Wringe@sybase.com
Subject: RE: [docbook] More than one value for an attribute. Hi Kate, As Bob says, the DocBook xsl’s profiling mechanism supports this, but I take your question to be about the authoring side of the problem. What you really want to know is if there’s a way to help the writer avoid doing something like vendor=”Windows XP, Linix” (where “Linix” is misspelled and so won’t have the desired effect). That seems to me a matter of editor customization. In fact, this is on my list of things to look into wrt the xrefstyle attribute. In that case, I would like to offer the writer a list of typical choices but still leave them free to enter arbitrary text so I don’ t have to enumerate every possibility in the schema. I haven’t figured out what to do yet, so please let me know if you come up with a situation. You might also ask your editor’s support folks to see if they have suggestions. David From: Bob Stayton [mailto:bobs@sagehill.net]
Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2011 6:02 PM
To: docbook@lists.oasis-open.org; Kate.Wringe@sybase.com
Subject: Re: [docbook] More than one value for an attribute. Yes, you can do this. See the third bullet item in this reference: ----- Original Message ----- Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2011 3:43 PM Subject: [docbook] More than one value for an attribute.
Hello,
Is there a way to define an attribute so that the writer can select more than one choice for its value (i.e., can an attribute be set to a delimited list of values)?
For example: vendor= "Windows XP, Windows 2008, Linux, Unix, Mac, iOS".
It seems that when attributes are discussed, that there is an assumption that the writer only wants to pick one value for the attribute. For example, when setting
the vendor attribute, the writer only needs to choose between Windows or Linux. However, we need to be able to specify more than value for the vendor attribute.
For example some of our content applies to Windows only, some of the content applies to Windows and Linux, some of the content applies to iOs and Mac Os, some of the content
applies to Windows, Linux, and Mac Os, etc., As we support more operating systems, the number of vendor combinations increases. We need to be able to append the new OS to the
vendor attribute. We don't want to have a set of different combinations to choose from as this would be cumbersome to work with.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Kate
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Kate Wringe | Senior Information Developer | SQL Anywhere Doc Team |
Sybase | 445 Wes Graham Way, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6R2 Canada | Tel: (519) 883-6838 | kate.wringe@sybase.com | www.sybase.com
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