RE: [dita-help] FW: DITA for the Web: Meeting invite for Wed Oct 21

["Tony Self" <tself@hyperwrite.com>]

Thanks for the info, Chris. Particularly relevant that the RDE is
ditabase-based. Do you (or anyone else) know of a plug-in that does that
sort of thing?

I have an idea that one of the Open Toolkit processing is to flatten conrefs
into a temporary DITA topic, although I think this is one-to-one, one
flattened topic per original topic.

Thinking ahead a bit here... Let's assume we have a Help context element
that can be included in either the map or the topic. We want to use
flattened DITA topics for Help delivery. If there is one big flattened
ditabase file, we would want the context hooks injected (presumably as IDs
of some sort) into the appropriate nested topic elements. That would mean
that whatever logic we used for cascading context hooks must be applied to
the flattened database topic. I can't see that anything that we've been
talking about to date would present any problem in this regards?

Tony Self


-----Original Message-----
From: Goolsby, Chris [mailto:cgoolsby@ptc.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, 4 November 2009 3:30 AM
To: tself@hyperwrite.com
Cc: dita-help@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [dita-help] FW: DITA for the Web: Meeting invite for Wed Oct 21

Hi Tony.

What we have is something we call the "Resolved Document for Editing"
(RDE). This is actually its own document type and is created as part of
integrating DITA document types into the Arbortext environment. It's
loosely based on database.

Creating an RDE is called from a menu item when editing a map. When
invoked, Arbortext Editor takes all of the topics from the map and uses
XInclude to include all of those topics into a single document that can
be edited in Arbortext Editor. While you cannot make structural changes
to the RDE, you can do editing in the topics, perform a spell check for
all of the topics in the map, do a find/replace operation for all of the
topics in the map, and so forth. Any changes made in the RDE are saved
back to the individual topics. Nested maps would be resolved and their
topics included in the topic flow. We resolve conrefs by default in
Editor -- that is, the content of the conref is displayed in the Editor
window.

This is mostly intended to be an aid for authors.

Regards.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Self [mailto:tself@hyperwrite.com] 
Sent: Sunday, November 01, 2009 12:13 AM
To: Goolsby, Chris
Cc: dita-help@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [dita-help] FW: DITA for the Web: Meeting invite for Wed
Oct 21

Dear Chris

At the last DITA Help Subcommittee meeting, you mentioned that Arbortext
included a transformation that generated "flattened" DITA output, with
conrefs resolved into normal elements.

Can you please expand on that feature? If I have one ditamap and lots of
topic files, will that be transformed into one big database file, or
will
the topics be preserved one-to-one? 

Are nested maps resolved into one map, or is the flattening only
occurring
at the topic level?

To explain for those not at the last meeting, we were looking at DITA as
a
delivery format for embedded user assistance such as field labels and
tool
tips. An issue with using DITA in this way (as a delivery rather than a
source format) is that it is relatively difficult to resolve conrefs on
the
fly.

Thanks

Tony Self