Configure a conditional attribute

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

IXIA 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.

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.

Figure: Example of the Set Conditions dialog box

Set conditions dialog
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:
Figure: Example of the Edit Profiling Attributes dialog box

Edit Profiling Attributes dialog

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

Figure: Example of the Create Ditaval dialog box
Create Ditaval dialog

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:

    OptionDescription
    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.
The conditional attribute you configured is available for use.