Dynamic content publishing with DITA - plus lots of DITA source examples

Blog entry: Submitted by Michael Priestley on Wed, 2008-03-12 21:53.

There's a pilot project out of Lotus using DITA for dynamic content publishing, and you can also see the DITA source for any of the content in the project. You can search DITA source and return maps and topics. You can turn a search result list into a map that you can publish as HTML or PDF, or you can use a shopping cart mode to select content from multiple searches and create a more custom map for publishing to PDF or HTML.

A couple of upfront caveats: this is a pilot project, so expect some rough edges and some relatively slow processing (this isn't running on big iron). Also, the DITA source is preprocessed to make it ready for final-stage publishing, which means you won't see any conrefs in there, and you will some debugging attributes like xtrf and xtrc that you should ignore.

Without further ado:

https://info2.lotus.com/cca

Once there, you can run a variety of queries - a simple one to get a variety of search results back is just to set content type to "Product documentation" and click Submit. You'll get a list of DITA maps, and the topics in each map, returned in the search results (you can narrow the search by adding more criteria). Click on a map or topic to open it in a new window.

To view the DITA source for a map or topic, once you've got it open in a new window, add this to the end of the url:

&responseType=dita

You can also get back product tour/training videos encapsulated by DITA so it can be pulled into HTML output - try the content type "Tour" for examples.

Have fun, and kudos to the great folks at Lotus for an outstanding example of what dynamic DITA can do, and for providing access to a great set of real DITA authoring examples.

--MP


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