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SDL Support for standard DITA condition profiling attributes

Ann Jensen

Hi,

I am still a bit unsure of Tridion's support of lack of support for standard DITA condition profiling attributes (audience, platform, product etc.). If I use them, how will they be handled by the SDL processors?

Also if I use the Content Importer to import DITA content that uses these, they are converted to ishconditions. Can this conversion be turned off?

Any feedback around this topic is greatly appreciated,

Regards,

Ann
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  • 0

    Hi Ann,

    We use a lot of filtering attributes in our DITA implementation, including the standard ones you mention.

    However, we chose to convert all DITA attributes in our legacy data to corresponding ishconditions in order to use Tridion's filtering functionality, which is very useful.

    Using standard attributes, they will not show up in the Conditions pane in Publication Manager and so on.

    We didn't think it was worth keeping them.

    Peter S

    Cytiva
  • 0 in reply to Peter Stromback

    Thanks for your reply Peter. Can I ask you to clarify what you mean when you say 

    Peter Stromback said:
    in order to use Tridion's filtering functionality,

    Also do you see any losses/cons in converting your standard condition attributes over to ishconditions?

    What editor do you use for authoring your DITA?

    Thanks again,

    Ann
  • 0 in reply to Ann Jensen

    Hi Ann,

    Sorry for the delay.

    I presume you will use Publication Manager.

    In the Conditions pane you can overview and can create a conditional context for all the ISH-conditions in the DITA files in the baseline.

    This is not available if you use standard DITA attributes - they don't show up and can't be applied. Unless you ask/pay for a special customization I would presume.

    Similarly, in the tree in Content pane, topics with conditions set on topic level are highlighted red (deselected, will not appear in output) and green (selected, will appear in output).

    This does not work for standard DITA attributes either.

    We use Oxygen as editor, and can apply ISH-conditions through the WAN bridge to Tridion (there a menu called SDL Tridion DOCS)

    The CON with using ISH-conditions is of course that it's not a standard DITA attribute, so we will have to convert them back to DITA attributes should we switch CMS.

    But the Tridion ISH-conditions and how you can select them and overview them in the Pub Manager interface is a great feature.

    We had to either choose sticking with DITA attributes and lose those features, or convert every standard attribute to an ISH-condition.

    I have not regretted that we chose the latter.

    Of course it would be great if Tridion could handle standard DITA attributes the same way ISH conditions are handled.

    As far as I am aware, this it not possible.

    The truth is of course that the filtering functionality was in place before DITA was introduced and likely a decision was taken to stick with it.

    Best,

    Peter
  • 0

    Ann,

    I am not speaking from experience, but I wouldn't expect that SDL had somehow removed support for standard DITA profiling. The profiling attributes are like any other attributes in terms of XML... just names and values as defined in the DITA Specification. I think most TDocs users choose to use the CMS condition management and ishconditions because they believe that they are easier to manage than DITAVALs and the OT, and can be applied to a much broader range of markup and structure. If your need to apply profiling any more sophisticated than @audience, @platform, @product, @otherprops, @rev (DITA 1.2/1.3), and @deliveryTarget (DITA 1.3), you need to specialize @props. With ishconditions, you don't need to deal with specializing your DTDs. 

    I would think that Content Importer could be configured to not auto-convert to ishconditions. But I don't know; it would be nice if SDL could comment.

    If using standard DITA profiling, the profiling attributes are just going to get passed through to the DITA XML output (resolved with all TDocs artifacts removed), and then it's up to the DITA-OT to process for profiling using the DITAVAL you reference. This is not SDL functionality; it's the DITA-OT whether you use TDocs or not. 

    If I am wrong about any of this, I'd love to be corrected and better informed! I just say all this because it wouldn't make sense to me for a "DITA" CMS to disable standard DITA markup or OT functionality.
  • 0 in reply to Jay Baldwin

    Thank you Jay for your reply before. I apologise that I got sidetracked from that research and am just back to it now. On rereading your detailed reply above, your mention of the DITAVAL file resonates with the challenge I am facing now. The sample scenario is that a team is coming from using a pre-defined DITAVAL file which can be created per category and it lists the instructions (include or exclude) for each relevant condition. What approach can this team use in SDL Publication Manager to maintain this type of shareable resource where they maintain all their condition rules for a given category which may be a large collection of rules that they don't want to have to recreate for every publication?

    Am I wrong, or does this seem more challenging in Publication Manager where you can't apply a DITAVAL file or something similar?

    Thanks again,

    Ann