Creating and using conrefs

The Referable-Content view lets you search for reusable components and insert them into documents.

What is a reusable component?

IXIA CCMS provides a topic specialization—the referable-content topic type—that you can use to store the text you plan to use in multiple topics. A reusable component is an element that is within the <rcbody> element and has an id attribute.

For example, consider the following referable-content topic:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE referable-content PUBLIC "-//IXIA//DTD IXIA DITA Composite//EN" "IxiaDitabase.dtd">
<referable-content id="per1389985725819" xml:lang="en-us">
   <title>Configure Kerberos authentication on the client</title>
   <rcbody>      
        <note id="kerberos_prerequisites">To use Kerberos authentication, the 
            client application and TEXTML Server must be running on Windows. Linux is not supported. 
        </note>
   </rcbody>
</referable-content>

The <note> with the kerberos_prerequisites id is considered a reusable component. You can reuse these components in other topics using conrefs.

For example, to reuse the Kerberos prerequisites paragraph in other topics, you create a conref to this paragraph in the target topic, as shown below:
<note conref="per1389985725819.xml#per1389985725819/kerberos_prerequisites"/>
To easily find reusable components and insert conrefs to them into other topics, open the Referable-Content view.

Overview of the Referable-Content view

Once you have created reusable content components, you use the Referable-Content view to search for these components and reuse them in other topics.

The following diagram shows an example of the Referable-Content view after a search:
Referable-content view
The Referable-Content view provides the following information about the reusable components:
  • Text Preview: Overview of the text that can be reused
  • Element: Element type of the reusable component
  • Element ID: ID assigned to the reusable component
  • Owner Document: Name of the document that contains the reusable component
This information can help you select the component to reuse in your document. You can restrict your search using the following criteria:
  • Element type: This drop-down list displays all the elements for which a reusable component is defined. You can search inside a specific element type or select All element types to search inside all element types.
  • Containing library: This drop-down list displays all the referable-component-library maps found in the Content Store. You can search inside a specific map or select All libraries to search inside all the maps.

Once you have found the text that you want to reuse, you can easily insert it into the target topic using the Referable-Content view.