DITA Publish to Web HTML

[peter.li]

Hi,

My DITA Topics are held in quite a complex folder hierarchy and when I publish to Web HTML it reproduces that hierarchy for the output too, however I have found that if there are too many levels then my browser can't handle it.

Is there a way to flatten to only one folder level e.g.

Now:

\Level 1\1.html

\Level 1\Level 2\2.html

\Level 1\Level 2\Level 3\3.html

Required:

\Level 1\1.html

\Level 2\2.html

\Level 3\3.html

I did a search in Help Center for "publishing dita documents" and it says that I can change this behaviour in the style file but I can't find where...

Thanks

Pete

[bibach]

In Styler 6.0, there is an "HTML Chunking" button on the "Breaks" tab,
which should let you control file names.

-Brandon 🙂

[peter.li]

Hey Brandon,

I've found those settings, but have no idea how to configure them to get the desired output, any ideas?

It seems like there should be a simple switch to say yes or no for multiple levels but it's proving elusive.

Thanks

Pete

[bibach]

A simple switch would be problematic in the general case. What
happens if two files in different directories have the same name? A
custom rule for how to handle such corner cases would be needed.

Setting the "Persistent file name" field in the "HTML Chunking" dialog
to "yes" will allow you to specify what the name (including path, but
not extension) should be. You can supply the name in an attribute or
via an XPath expression. The string functions in XPath 1.0 are rather
weak, but I got something like what you described with this:

concat(substring-before(@ch:filename, '/'), '/', substring-before(@id, '_'))

This is probably not very robust, but something like it may suffice
for your purposes, if there's reasonable consistency of certain
attributes in your source. When crafting something like this, the
Resolved Document for Styling is your friend, as it shows you all of
the markup that you have to work with.

-Brandon 🙂