On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:03 AM, Ginger Stuckey <-> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I'm back with yet more questions. I've created a template for our manual
> request form (again, thank you all) and I've created a small text entity
> file to try. I inserted the information and renamed the file to go with our
> product, CP Python. I closed the file and opened it again. It appeared with
> all of the formatting gone until I attached the style sheet. The style sheet
> is not named CP Python but it is manual_request.styler. Before I attached
> the style sheet I checked to see if the text entity file was there and it
> was not. When I attached the style sheet, I checked again and it was there.
> Why is that? How can I make sure that a particular style sheet is attached
> to a document even if the file names don't match?
>
Read help 1394 (Stylesheet association processing instruction).
> Are the text entity file and the style sheet connected somehow? If I have
> 18 files that all use the same style sheet and text entities, can I update
> the text entities in any of those files and have all 18 files update?
>
You might be thinking about file entities. Depending on the content you are
trying to "reuse" though, you might be able to use both/either. We use .ent
files to store text entities. The DTD calls these files. Assuming your 18
forms all use the same DTD, you should be able to make one change and have
it reflected across all 18 files. If you are using file entities, it should
work similarly but they will be called by each form's XML instance, not the
DTD.
> Next, what I want to do for our manual requests forms--18 of them--is to
> create a text entity with the appropriate information so that I can make
> multiple changes to all of the text entities and I want that change to
> appear in the files that use the text entities. I was looking at the Help
> Center information for programmers but I'm not sure creating a custom dialog
> box or something like that is the way to go. So, can I create a text entity
> file of some kind where I update once and the documents affected are
> updated?
>
We create a file named "application.ent" and reference from the DTD lke
this:
%my_app_ents;
The contents of application.ent might be:
This allows us to use &Release; anywhere in our XML instances and it
resolves to "October2010". When the release changes, we simply edit
application.ent.
Finally, can Arbortext output to an Excel spreadsheet? Multiple
> spreadsheets? We have three different matricies (don't ask me why) for
> books, drawings and something else I don't remember right now. I think it
> would be good to take that information, put it all in one place, update it,
> and output it to a spreadsheet. But it just occurs to me that we can do that
> in Excel by connecting workbooks somehow. Any way does Arbortext do that?
>
Curious to hear other responses to this one. I can imagine using an XSL
Transformation to output text that Excel could import easily, but I can only
imagine running three different paired XSL Transforms / Excel imports, not
one export that output three spreadsheet importable text files, let alone
connecting everything so it was automajic. But maybe my XSL-fu is weak and
unspirited.
--
Paul Nagai
