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Best Practice for Including "Other" files (ZIP, spreadsheets, etc.) in Publication Output?

Jason Coleman

I'm looking for the best practice for how to include "Other" files (particularly ZIP archives and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets) in our publication output. I can store these files in the repository in an "Other" type folder and then link to them via a DITA XREF element. However, that alone does not actually include the referenced file in the output (at least, without some modifications to the DITA-OT or other SDL publishing engine).

I can 'embed' the referenced file using a DITA image element (and then wrap that in a draft-comment to 'hide' it), but that seems like a sub-optimal workaround. Sure there is a standard way to support including these files in the output so that an end-user could click a link to save/open the referenced file, but I have yet to locate any documentation on the feature (possibly in part because a non-descriptive name such as "other" doesn't really lend itself to searching).

Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.
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    For the record, I am now using a <topicref> element in the map which points to the 'other' file. This <topicref> has the toc attribute set to 'no', which should suppress the file showing up as an entry in the table of contents (though in my experience, this attribute is not always honored by out-of-the-box publishing tools).

    The file is then linked to using a typical XREF element in a topic, with the attributes of scope set to 'external' and format set to the file extension of the target file itself (per the DITA v1.2 spec). This seems to work in LiveContent Reach (and, one would assume, Knowledge Base and Tridon Docs).
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    For the record, I am now using a <topicref> element in the map which points to the 'other' file. This <topicref> has the toc attribute set to 'no', which should suppress the file showing up as an entry in the table of contents (though in my experience, this attribute is not always honored by out-of-the-box publishing tools).

    The file is then linked to using a typical XREF element in a topic, with the attributes of scope set to 'external' and format set to the file extension of the target file itself (per the DITA v1.2 spec). This seems to work in LiveContent Reach (and, one would assume, Knowledge Base and Tridon Docs).
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