DITA Best Practices : DITA Maps Manager view

Oxygen XML Editor provides a special view for editing DITA Maps. The DITA Maps Manager view presents a DITA Map in a simplified table-of-contents manner. It allows you to navigate easily to the referred topics and maps, make changes, and apply transformation scenarios to obtain various output formats. The DITA-OT framework that is bundled with Oxygen XML Editor is used.

The view supports opening multiple documents at the same time.

All files that have the .ditamap or .bookmap extension are opened in the DITA Maps Manager view. In addition, you can right click the file in the Project view and select Open with. If you opened the DITA Map file in the editor panel you can open it also in this special DITA Map view by right clicking on the title tab of the editor panel and selecting the Open in DITA Maps Manager action from the popup menu.

You can move topics in the same map or between different maps by dragging and dropping them into the desired position. Also, you can copy topics by dragging them while pressing the Ctrl (Meta on Mac OS) key.

The toolbar includes the actions which are also available on menu DITA Maps:

• Reopen - You can use this drop-down to reopen recently viewed DITA Maps. Apart from the history of the recently viewed DITA Maps, the drop-down also contains the Clear history , Open, and Open URL actions;
• Clear history - Removes the list with the recently viewed DITA Maps;
• Open - Allows opening the map in the DITA Maps Manager view. You can also open a map by dragging it in the DITA Maps Manager view from the file system explorer;
• Open URL - Allows opening remote maps in the DITA Maps Manager view. See Open URL for details;
• Open from Data Source Explorer - Allows you to open a DITA Map from a data source explorer;
• Save (Ctrl (Meta on Mac OS)+S) - Saves the current DITA Map;
• Validate and Check for Completeness - Checks the validity and integrity of the map;
• Apply Transformation Scenario(s) - Applies the DITA Map transformation scenario that is associated with the current map from the view;
• Configure Transformation Scenario(s)... - Allows associating a DITA Map transformation scenario with the current map;
• Refresh References - You can use this action to manually trigger a refresh and update of all titles of referred topics. This action is useful when the referred topics are modified externally. When they are modified and saved from the Oxygen XML Editor Author, the DITA Map is updated automatically;
• Open Map in Editor with Resolved Topics - Opens the DITA Map in the main editor area with content from all topic references expanded in-place; Content from the referenced topics is presented as read-only and you have to use the contextual menu action Edit Reference to open the topic for editing.
• Open Map in Editor - For complex operations which cannot be performed in the simplified DITA Maps view (like editing a relationship table) you can open the map in the main editing area;
  Note: You can also use this action to open referenced DITA Maps in the Editor.
• Link with Editor - Disables/Enables the synchronization between the file path of the current editor and the selected topic reference in the DITA Maps Manager view;
  Note: This button is disabled automatically when you move to the Debugger perspective.
• Profiling/Conditional Text menu with the following actions:
  • Show Profiling Attributes - Enables/Disables displaying the values of the profiling attributes at the end of the titles of topic references. When enabled, the values of the profiling attributes are displayed both in the DITA Maps Manager view and in the Author editor;
  • Configure Profiling Condition Sets ... - Opens the preferences page for adding and editing the profiling conditions that you can apply in the DITA Maps Manager view and the Author editor. When a profiling condition set is applied, the keys defined in the DITA map are gathered by filtering out the excluded content;

If your map references other DITA Maps they will be shown expanded in the DITA Maps tree and you will also be able to navigate their content. For editing you will have to open each referenced map in a separate editor. You can choose not to expand referenced maps in the DITA Maps Manager view or referenced content in the opened editors by unchecking the Display referred content checkbox available in the Author preferences page.