Profiling (Conditional Content) in DITA

DITA provides a mechanism for profiling content (conditional). 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 conditions 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 Content

To apply a profiling attribute to an element in a topic or map, right-click on the element and select Edit Profiling Attributes. The Edit Profiling Attributes dialog is displayed, which allows you to check each of the profiling tokens that apply for each attribute.

The profiling attributes, and their potential values that appear in this dialog box, depend on what has been configured in your copy of Oxygen XML Editor. The content of the dialog is 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. In the image above, which is taken from the Oxygen XML Editor documentation project, values are defined for seven different products, but none for other profiling attributes, which are therefore omitted from the dialog.
If your project defines project level configuration values for the profiling attributes, those values are used
If your copy of Oxygen XML Editor defines global level configuration values for the profiling attributes, they are used
Otherwise, a basic 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: