DITA Profiling / Conditional Text

Profiling Attributes

You can profile content elements or map elements by adding one or more of the default DITA profiling attributes (product, platform, audience, rev, props, and otherprops). You can also create your own custom profiling attributes and custom profiling condition sets. The profiling attributes may contain one or more tokens that represent conditions to be applied to the content when a publication is built.

For example, you could define a section of a topic that would only be included for a publication related to the Windows platform by adding the platform profiling attribute:

<section platform="windows">

Profiling Conditions

DITA allows you to conditionally profile parts of a topic so that certain parts of the topic are displayed when certain profiling conditions are set. Profiling conditions can be set both within topics and in maps. When set in a topic, they allow you to suppress an element (such as paragraph), step in a procedure, item in a list, or even a phrase within a sentence. When set in a map, they allow you to suppress an entire topic or group of topics. You can then create a variety of publications from a single map by applying profiling conditions to the build.

Apply Profiling to DITA Content

To apply a profiling attribute to DITA content, highlight the content and select Edit Profiling Attributes from the contextual menu. To profile specific elements in a topic or map, right-click inside the element and select Edit Profiling Attributes. The Edit Profiling Attributes dialog box is displayed, allowing you to check each of the profiling tokens that apply for each attribute.

Edit Profiling Attributes Dialog Box

The profiling attributes, and their potential values, that appear in this dialog box depend on what has been configured in Oxygen XML Author. If you have a large list of profiling attributes, you can use the text filter field to search for attributes or values, and you can expand or collapse attributes by using the Expand All/Collapse All buttons to the right of the text filter or the arrow button to the left of the profiling attribute name.

The attributes and values that appear in the dialog box are determined as follows:

• If your root DITA map references a DITA subject scheme map that defines values for the profiling attributes, those values are used. Oxygen XML Author collects all the profiling values from the subject scheme map that is referenced in the map that is currently opened in the DITA Maps Manager (or set as the root map). In the image above (taken from the Oxygen XML Author documentation project), you see values for eight products. They are the only values that are defined in the subject scheme map and thus, are the only ones that appear in the dialog box.
• If you have defined profiling attribute values for the DITA document type in the Profiling/Conditional Text preferences page and you store them at project-level, those values are displayed in the dialog box.
• If you have defined profiling attribute values for the DITA document type in the Profiling/Conditional Text preferences page and you store them at global-level, those values are displayed in the dialog box.
• Otherwise, a generic default set of profiling attributes and values are available.

Visualizing Profiled Content

You can visualize the effect of profiling content by using the profiling tools in the Profiling/Conditional Text drop-down menu that is located on the DITA Maps Manager toolbar. You can select which profiles to show, or apply colors to text that is profiled in various ways, as shown in the following image:

Example: Profiled Content

If the Show Profiling Attributes option (available in the Profiling / Conditional Text drop-down menu) is enabled, a green border is painted around profiled text in the Author mode. Also, all profiling attributes set on the current element are listed at the end of the highlighted block and in its tooltip message. To edit the attributes of a profiled fragment, click one of the listed attribute values. A form control pops up and allows you to add or remove attribute values.

Profiling Attribute Value Form Control Pop Up