XML Reference Tags

[Asparagus]

Hello all,

I am new at XML. I have recently been given an extremely large XML document (it's a manual for repairing helicopters) . I'm supposed to take this document and break it down into a series of smaller XML files. Then, I need to create a "backbone" document which calls in all of the smaller docs (rather than having everything in one huge doc).

For example, my manual consists of 20 chapters. I'm going to take each chapter and make it into its own XML file (ch1.xml, ch2.xml, etc.). After I do that, I need to make a central document (manual.xml) which calls in each of the individual chapters. What sort of tags should I use to do this? I've found some tutorials on <xref> and <eref> tags, but I don't think that's what I need. Any ideas? I'm at a loss for where I should start...

Thanks!

 

[kamper]

It all depends on what application will be reading the document once it's split up into multiple files. I'm not familiar with <xref> or <eref> tags but even if they were supposed to do what you want them to, you'd still need an application that understands how to process them.

The standard xml way of pulling together multiple documents is XInclude, I believe (don't have my xml handbook handy). You could look up and see if it'll do what you need. But again, it depends on what's reading the files. URLs for the other files can also get interesting. For instance, if they're all in the same directory on a local hard drive, you might just use the file names as urls and hope the app can figure it out. Sometimes you have to write code to load all the documents yourself and put them in a common place so that a parser can find them.

 

[Asparagus]

Okay...thanks for the Xinclude info - that looks like it might be my ticket.

Once I get the XML into the right format, we're going to use this XML formatted document to publish a printed version of the helicopter manual. Right now, I'm using Arbortext's Epic Editor to do all the editing. I'll then use another Arbortext tool to take that XML document and create a PDF document from it. This PDF will be just a printed version of the manual for the helicopter mechanics to read...it will not contain all of the tags and formatting info. We're basically using XML to do glorified text editing at this point...

 

[kamper]

Ok, so whatever you choose, you need to make sure it is supported by that second Arbortext tool. I'd recommend consulting their documentation for best practices as their website seems to specifically advertise that you can break documents into 'components'.