DITA Map import

[wbrisett]

Has anybody tried to bring in a single DITA file with multiple topics in it, into Flare? If so, did it properly tag the file?

History
I wrote a custom script that takes some HTML output and organizes it into DITA files. This results in around 20,000 individual DITA files, each mapped into the DITA map. The DITA map ends up being the TOC.

In an effort to reduce the 20,000 single files that I'm cramming through Flare, I decided to modify my script to rewrite the DITA files and map, so that I'm using multiple topics inside a single topic. The idea is to hopefully reduce the size of the end project and reduce the number of files (Windows absolutely hates 20,000 files in a single directory... just opening up an explorer window to look at the files is a multiple minute process at times... oh Flare, why aren't you available on UNIX/Linux/Mac OS X...).

Current Problem
The problem I've seen is two-fold. First, upon import of the DITA map, Flare breaks out the files into separate files, so you end up with a large number of files, which was the problem to begin with. Second, it's not using those files! Let's say the first file (your master file) is: A_123.xml, it has three topics inside with reference IDs of A234, A235, and A236 (for those non-DITA folks I haven't lost yet, all DITA IDs must begin with an alpha character). Inside the map, it looks something like this:

A_123.ditamap

Code: Select all

<map id="v815942" title="MyBigRegister">
   <topichead navtitle="BigRegister Area">
        <topicref type="reference" href="A_134.xml#A234" />
        <topicref type="reference" href="A_134.xml#A235" />
         <topicref type="reference" href="A_134.xml#A236" />
   </topichead>
</map>

By the way, if anybody decides to do this, make sure you include the optional navtitle="what you want to see in Flare's TOC" and locktitle="yes", if you don't then Flare will use the same title for each item in the TOC.

Since the master file is called A_134, Flare breaks up the content into four files: A_134, A_1311, A_1312, and A_1313

Note: This by the way MadCap is not a good idea. How do you know I don't have a file called A_1313 already in my project? I know most people use human readable file names, but there are times when numbers are part of the file name for various reasons (hardware addresses for example).

As I see it, two things are wrong here, in Flare's TOC, A_1311, A_1312, and A_1313 are never used! All items in the TOC point back to A_134, yet inside A_134 there are no markers breaking up the items in the XHTML file Flare creates. You can manually enter bookmarks and set them in the TOC, but if you have 20,000 of them, you don't want to do this.

So, the question after all of this is, does anybody try to use DITA as an import and if so, are you doing it by having each topic as its own file, or are you trying to use multiple topics inside a single file? If inside a single file, have you noticed the above behavior?

Thanks!
Wayne

[eklisiewicz]

Hi, Did you ever get an answer to this question? I am toying with DITA imports and have all my topics at the same level in the TOC. I have not tried combining topics yet, but I can see where this might be prudent, especially in situations where you have a ton of topics.

[wbrisett]

The answer is, it doesn't work the way 'I' think it should. There was an enhancement request put in a while back, but I don't think anything has been done about it. So, the short answer is to use individual files and a ditamap.

Wayne

[eklisiewicz]

Are you available to answer TOC questions? Assuming you are, I will post my questions here.

Specifically, I open my .ditamap file and import my DITA project into Flare using all the default settings. at that point, I do not tweak any styles.

Once the import is done, I double click on the TOC file (imported map, I assume).

There is no formatting and all the topics are at the same level.

However, on generating a PDF output, I thought that the TOC would be included, but it's not. I know I could move around topics within the TOC file and in a bookmarks view, they'd be indented, but I want to see a standard book TOC like I do inside FrameMaker or Word. I am used to Flare just picking up my TOC styles from FrameMaker and generating help from it.

My DITA files were sourced in FrameMaker 7 and converted to DITA through MIF2Go. If you know of some good resources for delving more deeply into this material, let me know. Thank you.

[gfevrier]

I was having the same problem with the TOC not importing correctly from the ditamap in my XMetal source files. Then I read Sarah O'Keefe's blog post Flare 5 DITA feature review (Part 1: Overview and map files) http://www.scriptorium.com/palimpsest/2 ... art-1.html. When I imported the ditamap and DITA files from XMetal, I now see there are two TOCs in Flare: one, which appears to be the default TOC in Flare, is named for the first topic in the list that was imported (which is the TOC without a hierarchy - the one I don't want), and one apparently created from the ditamap since it has the same name. So once I associated the one created from the ditamap in the WebHelp settings, it worked fine.

The only trouble I'm having now is that I can't figure out how to set up the WebHelp once and maintain the links to the XMetal source files.

[wbrisett]

Gina:

Most of that review is pretty dated and doesn't apply anymore. I've stuck with individual files, but I could see using some of the Flare specific options such as just using the headings for the TOC, which would mean just creating a DITA topic with sections. Technically you're not suppose to use sections to build hierarchy in DITA, but since we're already not being DITA purist about things by using Flare, which converts things to XHTML, then that shouldn't be a big deal.

Wayne

[gfevrier]

I created a DITA Book in XMetal, which saves as a .ditamap file. When I imported it and the DITA XML files to Flare 7, Flare created two TOCs (in the Project Organizer folder): a Default TOC (named from the first topic in the imported list, and a TOC created from the DITA Book (ditamap). The TOC retains the file hierarchy in the DITA Book. I generated the WebHelp using the DITA-based TOC, and everything in the TOC displays in the correct hierarchy. I don't know if this will help you, but it may help someone else.

Waiting for our developer to hook the WebHelp to our application to test the context-sensitive help and I'll post about that later.