Configure a conditional attribute

Conditional attributes let users tailor the same document for different audiences and products.

IXIASOFT CCMS supports the DITA attributes that let you hide portions of text—or even entire topics—that do not apply to a specific condition.

Important: Make configuration changes in a test environment and confirm they work before copying them to a production environment. For dedicated SaaS deployments, test the changes and then ask IXIASOFT Customer Support to copy the changes to your production environment.

A user can apply conditions on objects in a map or elements in topics, and then specify the conditions to generate output. For example, when users click the Set Conditions button in the DITA Map view, the Set Conditions window lists the conditions that are currently configured in the CMS, grouped by attribute.

When users right-click highlighted content in a topic in Author mode (in the Oxygen XML Editor) and click Edit Profiling Attributes, the dialog box lists the available conditions:

Also, when users create Ditaval files through the IXIASOFT CCMS Desktop, a list of conditions is displayed in the Create Ditaval dialog box.

To configure a conditional attribute:

1. In the TEXTML Administration perspective, connect to your server.
2. Locate the conditionaltext.xml file in the repository.
3. Check out the file and open it for editing.
4. For each condition to display in the dialogs, create a <category> entry, specifying the following information:

   <condtextsettings>    
       <category name="condition_name" xmlattribute="attribute_name">
           <allowedvalue deprecated="true|false">value</allowedvalue>
       </category>
   </condtextsettings> 

   Where:

   Option	Description
   condition_name	Name of the condition as displayed in the dialogs
   attribute_name	Name of the XML conditional processing attribute
   deprecated="true|false"(optional)	Specifies whether this value is deprecated or not. When set to true, the value will not be displayed in the dialogs. Default value is false.
   value	Value that can be set for this condition. Create one <allowedvalue> element per valid value.

   For example, to create the dialogs shown above, you would have the following code:

   <condtextsettings>    
       <category name="Audience" xmlattribute="audience">
           <allowedvalue>expert</allowedvalue>
           <allowedvalue>novice</allowedvalue>
       </category>
       <category name="Platform" xmlattribute="platform">
           <allowedvalue>linux</allowedvalue>
           <allowedvalue>mac</allowedvalue>
           <allowedvalue>solaris</allowedvalue>
           <allowedvalue>windows</allowedvalue>
       </category>
       <category name="Product" xmlattribute="product">
           <allowedvalue>product 1</allowedvalue>
           <allowedvalue>product 2</allowedvalue>
       </category> 
   </condtextsettings>

5. Save, close, and check in the file.
6. Inform users of the changes and request that they close and reopen their CCMS Desktop to apply the changes.