XSLT-Conref: Reuse for everything and everyone!
The Conref concept of DITA is an efficient way of reusing content in multiple publications, thus reducing maintenance efforts and the risk of inconsistencies. But what if the information that you want to reuse is available, but not in the right form? Maybe the information is dispersed throughout your document ─ or it is not properly arranged ─ or not even DITA ─ or not XML at all.
The concept of XSLT-Conref extends the standard DITA Conref by applying an (individually designed) XSL transformation to the referenced content when resolving the reference. This technique can be applied to a wide range of use cases. Examples are extraction of information from source code to display it in your document or generation of illustrations from the description of user interfaces that are specified in DITA.
What can attendees expect to learn?
- Learn the concept and usage of XSLT-Conref. (It will be made available as open source plugins for oXygen editor and DITA-OT.)
- An approach to avoid the risk of inconsistent information
- Reduce effort for multiple conversions of the same information.
Meet the Presenter
Patrik has a PhD in mechatronics and 25+ years of experience in software engineering. Since 2009 he has been working as a system architect with GDV DL – a joint venture of German insurers developing and providing IT solutions.
As a system architect, Patrik mainly writes system specifications and is responsible for the handbook of procedures that is authored in specialized DITA.
Over the past years he has been continuously improving the authoring environment for specifications using DITA and modern XML technologies with great success.