Profiling DITA Content

You can filter DITA content or the structure of a document by using profiling attributes or profiling conditions sets.

Defining Profiling Attributes for DITA Content

To define or edit profiling attributes for filtering DITA content, follow these steps:

  1. Open the Preferences dialog box (OptionsPreferences) and go to EditorEdit modesAuthorProfiling / Conditional Text.
  2. In the Profiling Attributes section, there are already some default attributes for DITA documents (audience, platform, product, otherprops, and rev), although if a Subject Scheme Map is used for profiling your content, you will see the attributes defined in your subject scheme map instead. You can add new attributes and values by clicking the New button at the bottom of the table, or customize existing attributes and their values by selecting an attribute and clicking the Edit button.

    Step Result: This opens a Profiling Attribute configuration dialog box that allows you to define attributes that exist in your schema.

  3. In this configuration dialog box, use the New, Edit, Delete buttons to add, edit, or delete possible values of the selected attribute. You can also specify an optional description for each attribute value and you can choose whether the attribute accepts a Single value or Multiple values separated by a delimiter (DITA only accepts space as delimiters for attribute values).
  4. Click OK to accept your changes.

Result: You should see your changes in the Profiling Attribute table.

You can also use the Profiling Condition Sets section to apply more complex filters on you DITA content.

Applying Profiling Attributes in DITA

You can apply the DITA profiling attributes that were defined in the previous section in the following contexts:

DITA Topics
To profile DITA topics, right-click a topic reference in the DITA Maps Manager, select Edit Properties from the contextual menu, go to the Profiling tab, and select the appropriate values.
DITA Content
To profile DITA content in Author mode, highlight the content and select Edit Profiling Attributes from the contextual menu and select the appropriate values in the subsequent dialog box.
DITA Elements
To profile specific XML elements in Author mode, right-click inside the element (or right-click the element name in the breadcrumb navigation bar), select Edit Profiling Attributes, and select the appropriate values in the subsequent dialog box. You can also use the Attributes view to set the profiling attributes on the element at the current cursor position.

To display the DITA profiling markup in the Author editing mode, enable the Show Profiling Attributes option in the Profiling / Conditional Text drop-down menu that is available on the toolbar (or from the DITAProfiling/Conditional Text menu).

Adding or Editing Profiling Attribute Values

There are several ways to add values to existing profiling attributes.

  • Use the procedure in Defining Profiling Attributes for DITA Content to edit an existing attribute and use the Profiling Attribute configuration dialog box to add, edit, or delete values for existing profiling attributes.
  • You can add values directly to the existing profiling attributes in a document using the In-Place Attributes Editor in Author mode, the Attributes view, or in the source code in Text mode. However, this just adds them to the document and does not change the conditional text configuration. If you invoke the Edit Profiling Attributes action (from the contextual menu in Author mode) on the new value, the Profiling Values Conflict dialog box will appear and it includes an Add these values to the configuration action that will automatically add the new value to the particular profiling attribute. It also includes an Edit the configuration action that opens the Profiling / Conditional Text preferences page where you can edit the profiling configuration. The action selected by default is to preserve the current configuration.

    Note

    If the Allow additional profiling attribute values collected from the document option is disabled in the Profiling / Conditional Text preferences page, the Profiling Values Conflict dialog box will never appear, the current conditional text configuration will be preserved, and therefore the second method mentioned above will not be available.

    Profiling Values Conflict Dialog Box

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