book level workflow and roundtripping

[_Shelley_Hoose_]

HI folks,

I am nonplussed by Frame's apparent behavior when roundtripping.

Given a generic rule like this:
put element "chapter" in file "chap.fm";

The chapters increment each time you re-import XML to Frame so that
the first time you might have chap1, chap2 and chap3, but the next
time, you'll have chap4, chap5, and chap6 and so on. This occurs even
when you click "yes" to overwrite the existing files.

This plays havoc not only with identifying which chapter you are in or
are looking for, but also with any attempt to save documents under any
version control system, since their names are always changing.

I find this astonishing, so I feel sure I am missing some obvious
book-level workflow. Our goal is to save a book as XML under version
control, then have our writers check out the entire book, or documents
as needed, open them in Frame, edit as necessary, save back to XML,
and check back into version control.

This must be a common process for writers working in structured
documents. Am I missing something?

Thanks so much for any ideas,
Shelley

[Russ Ward]

Hi Shelley,

I don't have a good answer for you, but I wanted to at least let you know that you aren't alone in your assessment. The clunky relationship between FM books and XML roundtripping probably has its roots in the fact that there really is no such thing as a "book" in XML, so the engineers of FM chose a certain way to sort of mimic it. In my work, I've found it better to simply avoid the whole book thing in XML, dealing with XML at the file level only. This has required some customization of FM, though, to regain the book structure (along with the book benefits) once back in FM.

If I were more inclined to fuss with the book during roundtripping, I might have figured something else out and could be more helpful to you. I'm sorry that I am not.

Russ

[_Shelley_Hoose_]

Russ,

Thanks (I guess!) for your reply, although it's certainly not what I wanted to hear.

So given the opportunities to control roundtripping through either XSLT, the FDK, or a client API, would there be a way to:

* Save book as XML, which generates various entities and files based on the chapters' names
* Open the XML book in Frame and have it RETAIN the names of the entity files in Frame rather than using the generic "chapter1", "chapter2" etc.
* Resave said book as XML so that it retains the same entity names
* And so on.

The main take-home point being to retain the same names each time.

And if not, would you mind sharing (briefly)your own workflow w/o using a book-level file?

Thanks in advance,
Shelley

[Russ Ward]

Hi Shelley,

In my dealings with FM/XML, I use XML files like FM documents, authoring and saving them like FM binary files, checking in/out of source control individually, etc. These files are always intended to be chapters of some publication down the road, so the FM book concept is still an important part of being able to effectively publish. The problem with this, though, is that FM does not handle non-FM files in a book very well. You can get some things to work such as chapter and page numbering, but it is clunky and time-consuming every time you want to do it. So, when I need to publish, I have an API client which basically converts the XML files to FM to make a "throwaway" book, used just for making a PDF or whatever.

The process of converting an XML-file book to FM files is fairly straight-forward if you work with the API or FrameScript. It really only takes a couple of steps per file:

- Save as FM binary
- Adjust all cross-reference file targets, replacing the *.xml extension with *.fm

Note that this workflow assumes that the "book" concept is only useful to you in FrameMaker... if you need the higher-level book container in XML, you'd need to do something a little different.

This is certainly a home-made type of workflow and I don't know that it would be useful to you or not. I just brought it up because I've come to work this way due to dissatisfaction with FM books and XML. I saw on the Yahoo forum that you got some good advice, hopefully somewhere between here and there you can get something working.

Russ