DITA referencing and conref

[hadih26673991]

Hi, I have a question regarding the use of conref in DITA. I have created a simple DITA concept file, see attached for a snapshot of the structure view. In this file, I have few nested concepts with clear ids. Now, I would like to refer to the individual concepts of this file using conref. What I have in mind is something like text insets. For instance, I would like to pull only the concept "europe" into a different file. Using a ditamap, I was only able to pull the whole file into the ditamap. But this is not exactly what I have in mind as I would like to avoid breaking down my files into very small pieces.

Hadi

[Amitojsingh]

Hi Hadi

Can you share some more details or probably drop me an email and i could help you out with the same.

Thanks

Amitoj Singh

Email: amisingh@adobe.com

[hadih26673991]

Hi Amitoj, Thank you for your help. I have prepared a graphics, helping me explain, see attached. Basically, what I am trying to build is a structured user manual interface or call it a project, where I can store small pieces of topics inside bigger xml files as warehouse topics. These xml files can include from one to multiple topics with individual IDs that I can use later on to refer to. In my project, we have a user manual for each of our products as well as for each language (each user manual is translated into some different languages). And since there are many identical parts between the different user manuals as well as between the different languages, we would like to benefit from the re-use ability of structured authoring. In my short search in the web, I realized that DITA offers different ways of doing that. One way would be conref. Maybe I understood it wrong, but what I realized is that with conrefs, one can create different smaller topics in an xml files and then independently reuse those topics in other xml files or in a ditamap. However, when I created a ditamap, I was not able to pull the individual concepts that I have marked in my DITA concept files. In the ditamap, I do not see conref as an element like topicref. Using topicref, I insert the whole xmlfile into the ditamap though. Best, Hadi

[hadih26673991]

Somehow a stupid (or a very smart) system is detecting my replies as spam. So, I emailed it to you directly.

[hadih26673991]

When it comes to web interface, one would expect more from Adobe. This interface is embarassing. You cannot even attach graphics in one shot!

[hadih26673991]

Hi Amitoj, first of all thank you for the time you spent solving my problem. Unfortunately, I haven't yet been able to solve the issue. One problem is to use conref at lower levels than topic. As you mentioned, I have assigned elemnt ids to paragraphs, bodies and titles inside my topics. However, when I try to refer to those elements, they do not appear in the list. I can only conref to the whole topic. However, switching to xml, one can manually edit the file and conref to whatever elemnt having an ID. So, I guess it is a bug in FrameMaker interface, not showing all the labeled elements. However, the attempt to edit the xml did not solve the issue as the xref is still broken in the book. 

I have created a schematic image, showing the original problem.

Hadi

[Amitojsingh]

Sure Hadi. Let me set up some time tomorrow on call to discuss this further.