Commenting an EDD?

[Timothyc55]

For a number of historical reasons I have a quite complex EDD that, while it works quite well, is quite difficult to maintain. When I need to make a tweak to achieve something needed, I always have difficulty working out what and where I need to make a change.

While FrameMaker does provide a comment capability, it is limited to the element level. What I need, is the means to add comments at the rule level to explain what different context rules are there for. Something like the commenting available for most software languages.

Are there some tricks someone might know for adding comments within the rules?

I have often thought of extracting the EDD for the EDD itself and adding in a comment element, but I can't help thinking that it couldn't be that easy. 

[Russ Ward]

Hi,

I have heard it is possible to modify the EDD of an EDD. But I do not know the details and I agree that it might be difficult. Seems like it would be VERY EASY to break the algorithm that FrameMaker uses to parse it.

I just thought of a primitive idea, perhaps clumsy, but might work. Maybe you could use any text-containing elements for comments, then hide them with conditional text before importing definitions? I just did a little experiment where I made a Comments element conditional, then pasted it anywhere. Once I hid the tag, the EDD imported fine. In this case, the Comments element was invalid where I put it, but you could also conditionalize any element that is valid in the respective location.

Russ

[frameexpert · Accepted solution]

Take a look at Lynne Price's website. She has a free EDD template that allows more thorough commenting, etc.

http://www.txstruct.com/

[Timothyc55]

The Lynne Price template does just what I want.  Thanks