eSigning DITA Made Easy

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hi everybody welcome to this session on working with data Maps I'm going to explore a couple of different key things that you need to think about when you're working with maps and you need to be able to plan create manage and publish content I'll spend a little bit of time talking about planning and outlining a map from a higher level some of the basics of linking information what happens when you have a parent and child relationship rel Tables as another way of managing links attributes that can be used to drive some of the output and I'll also touch on did a vowel files that allow for conditional publishing I'll show a little bit of a hands-on in framemaker x metal and oxygen now your version of these software tools may be different than the one that I'm using not a big deal just work your way through it and generally speaking they will all work similar to what you're going to see in the demo I also want to mention that not all of the slide to the topics are going to be equally weighted some will be more useful to you than others the slide speed will probably vary it's not 30 seconds per slide but you can watch and pause the video as you work your way through things I would love to claim any of the herbs the typos is done on purpose but they isn't they weren't never in the ain't I will fix them as I can if you do notice something there are a couple of ways that you can contact me and Twitter is usually a pretty good tool for it my contact information is also at the very end of the slides and I'd suggest that if certain slides are useful to you track the slide numbers at the top of the screen or jot down the timestamp on how far you are into the session so that you can quickly jump back to that location my name is Bernard Ashwin and I'm with publishing smarter and a bit of a Content strategist publishing technologies expert author and geeking off to have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing but not so weak that I'll lose you in the details hopefully I'm a certified technical trainer and I do a lot of work in the data and content management space and topic based writing I'm also involved with the STC as the past president and an Associate Fellow and the last of my introductory slides the standard disclaimer in the interest of brevity I will make some blanket statements as I work through things try to keep it simple not everything is 100% the truth but I will try to stay close purists may end up complaining I'd say they're wrong because what I'm trying to do is just explain ideas but if you do talk to a purist who says act these are the specifics you know they may very well be right I want to give you enough to get you started and to get you thinking about these things but not get you buried in all of the detail let's get started and to get started I'm going to talk about planning and outlining your map odds are the most important thing you do when you're working with a map is done before you even start doing anything with the software you need to make sure you have a good idea of the topics to write in many cases you sit down and you brainstorm to get started the very first time you'd likely identify some sort of a high level goal that somebody wants to achieve once you know what that high level goal is you start to identify the different topics that you're going to need in order to put this together in order to teach somebody or in order to guide them or in order to provide the appropriate reference information so you build a list of all of the different topics as you start to identify what order that those topics go in you can organize the list with main topics and subtopics and in some cases you may realize that you have to add additional information you may end up starting with an older set of documentation you may have legacy material a table of contents from a previous document that exists perhaps even legacy files that are hundreds or even thousands of pages long it is incredibly important when it comes time to plan your map that you review this type of information have an understanding and again perform those three core tasks for identifying what is the goal what are the topics in order to help someone achieve the goal and what order should those topics be presented in you should also likely create some shell content if you don't already have materials even if you do you may want to set up a basic file with nothing other than a title and a short description and those two become really crucial and you'll see why a little later on in the video once you have identified and spent time putting together all of this information then you can start to fire up the software and perform some of the tasks that you'll see inside this presentation but make certain you know exactly what that end goal is and how to get there otherwise you're going to spending your time spinning your wheels trying to go through and creating all kinds of content without having a clear understanding of whether or not that content actual has value during this presentation and just for our specific purposes here I'm going to actually create a couple of topics that are designed to teach people about maps so my end goal is to actually create did a documentation that teaches people about maps and in kind of a meta way I'm going to teach you about maps by writing about maps so my goal is to help you create manage and publish a map and I'm going to write a few different topics I'll explain what a map is at least with a title in a short description how to create a map from scratch how to add topics to a map how to reorganize these topics how to publish the content and a little bit about some of the publishing formats that are supported to do all of this I'm going to actually create a couple of topics I'm going to create some of the topics related to my concept about data Maps my reference on publishing outputs and several tasks related to creating maps adding topics reorganizing publishing and you can use any data software I'm going to work with framemaker and with x-metal and with oxygen in order to show you a little bit of each of these again most of the tools are similar but in the framemaker world under the data menu you can choose new data file and in this example I'm going to create a concept but you can see multiple options are available this is a little bit of what the default looks like if you're not familiar with how to go in and work with a basic document inside frame-maker i'd suggest you take a little bit of time and watch one of my other videos because I don't want to go into too much detail quick things top right-hand corner if your structure and XML environment is not showing and you don't see that XML slash structured click the drop down make sure you choose it if you don't see that check that you're in the structured interface easy way to check the main menus across the very top file edit do you have one that's called element and a little further on do you have one that's called ditto if you do not under edit preferences you'll have to change the interface to structured framemaker in any case this is what it should generally look like I'm going to go and type in a title it's pretty easy to get the text in there by default frame-maker places the insertion point next to the title so all you need to do as soon as you create a new topic of any type whether it's concept task reference or a generic topic is start typing the title if there's elements that you don't need in this case I'm going to get rid of the prologue what you can do is click right in the middle of it and when it's selected press Delete that was pretty straightforward again I click in the middle of related links then I press Delete you then continue to add content in my case I'm going to click beside short desc just a little bit to the right of it in the structure view and type in a short description and then I'll click beside the P element in the paragraph and type in a paragraph and create a little bit of content so that I have a finished initial concept once I'm done the content might appear something like what you see here a finished title short description and a paragraph inside the concept body to put together the body information for all of your material does take a little bit of time and since I want to focus on maps subsequent topics are going to get title and short description and I'll just remove the body in order to get things started that was the approach inside frame maker in x-metal after you choose file new and you select a reference you can do the same type of a thing you can click inside the title type content the order in which you do these things doesn't matter I could type in a short description then delete the reference body or I could select the reference body and delete it and then take the short description as long as at the end you end up with a title and a short description for the topics that are going to become a part of your map that's the important piece make sure that those two key things exist title and short description and of course follow the outline in regards to planning your map once I click inside ref body I can press Delete to finish off working in x-metal I'll click inside the short description and type something in this represents how you might go about creating a topic if you were instead working with x-metal I'm showing you two software tools and I'll work with one more this is oxygen and again I've gone in and created under file a new and in this case a task instead of a concept or a reference after highlighting the content in the title I type in new text just as I did in the other tools I'll click inside the body content in this case the task body and delete it I've also gone in added a short description and you can see what the finished topic may look like with a title and the short description let's move on after I've done my planning after I've identified the different topics that I need after I've come up with some type of an organization what I'm going to need to do is build a basic did a map the topics that I have includes the list that's here the concept of reference and for tasks that I will go in and create and it may take a little bit of a while to put those together but I create an initial map afterwards of all of those files and give it a title this map is going to be titled create and publish Maps because my goal is my big goal that I've identified previously is that people who watch this video are going to know at the end how to create and publish maps once I put the title together once I've identified what the topics are I'm going to save the map and I end up with one of these three types of views I may end up in framemaker which is in the background in x-metal which is the middle of the three or in oxygen which is in the foreground it doesn't matter which tool you work with you'll see that there are very strong similarities between them in regards to the way that a map is represented let me take a few minutes and go in and show you how to do this in each of the different software tools in order to create a map inside frame-maker I choose data new data file and then I click on new map the map is created and I'll click once inside the map title location that gives me a location that I can then go and start to insert topic graphs and if I had 25 topics in here I could click on any one of them an insert additional topic graph and a topography is a topic reference it is the Maps way of being instructed exactly where and what file exists that needs to be inserted clicking the very first toolbar icon directly above the map gives me a pop-up and I can choose topic ref in the resulting pop up there's a lot of choices but just click browse in the resulting dialog you could choose to double click any one topic in order to insert it or if you're using frame-maker hold down control click on other topics each control click adds another topic to the collection once you've collected all those topics click select you are returned to the dialog and then can click OK to add them to the map this is how one of the three tools handles adding topics to a map once you're done of course make sure that you save the map put it into an appropriate location in this case I probably put it into my G Drive as well in the same location that all of my other information about ditto Maps is to be found that is the G Drive slash didn't underscore maps and I may name it something as simple as working with maps dot did a map each tool is a little different in x-metal under file I would choose new here the information is organized by primary tabs and you can see I'm currently in the one named did a topic I'm going to click instead on did a map within it I have a couple of different types of map but the one I want is the fourth one in map in x-metal I'm immediately prompted for the map title which I'll type it once done I click OK or press Enter my map is created with the map selected I click insert and I'll choose the first option topic reference topic rough-in framemaker topic reference here inside x-metal exact same idea minor differences in the way that they're implemented inside the resulting dialog and click browse make sure that it's the first browse the one that's related to the href frame maker allow me to select multiple files by ctrl-clicking x-metal only allows you to insert one at a time but there's a reason for it so i'm going to go in and click on the reference it's selected and then i can click open x-metal prompts you for a set of properties the difference between frame-maker and x-metal then is that in framemaker you can insert multiple documents but then you have to individually assign these different properties in x-metal you can select one at a time and you have a dialog that immediately pops up allowing to configure all of the inserted topic references it's up to you on which tool you're going to work with and how you work with them but the idea is exactly the same the implementation within the software tools has some differences both tools allow you to insert content into a map both tools allow you to assign attribute values such as the ones seen here in general or under other attributes or topic meta and both tools have slightly different ways of doing it but at the end of the day you still end up with an entirely valid map that's being used for data purposes and to conclude the idea I'm going to go in in oxygen and choose file new in order to create a map oxygen does something pretty neat here you can see at the top it has the type filter text now I've recently worked with tasks and maps and filters and all kinds of other content so map is already available but if it was not you could simply start typing map and will automatically find it inside the list of all the available documents and as soon as you see map and then in the square brackets did a map slash map you could go ahead and create one again I've already worked with a map previously so I can just double click it I'm going to open the map in the data maps manager but if you had clicked on editor or if you had already done this and click do not show the dialog again and you're trying to figure out how do you go back and forth between the two and we'll show you later in the video how to toggle the view between the data map manager and the editor and all three software tools allow you to do this so I'm clicking data maps manager it technically doesn't matter that much by the time you're done watching the video you'll know how to toggle back and forth anytime you need it and there are several different ways that I can go and I can add topic graphs I'm going to click the first icon directly above the untitled three did a map this results in a dialog that is a little bit of a hybrid between what x-metal and what framemaker do keep an eye in the dialog I'm going to click on the task to create a map but watch what happens in the bottom portion of the dialog especially around the area where the properties are located with a single document selected I can populate the properties but I can also hold down ctrl and click a second topic and I'm going to click on the task for reorg map watch what happens to the properties this time because these attributes are applied on a topic by topic level they're grayed out if I select more than one so you can choose which approach you want to take and again later on I will show you how to work with this dialog again so that you can take any of the topics that are inside your map and manipulate them by changing around some of these properties I'm showing you three different tools how you can go through and create a map add a couple of topics to it and I've talked a little bit about features of each of the different software tools let's move on I've talked about creating Maps at this point and always opening them up in the map view but I also mentioned especially when we talk to oxygen that you can toggle this so let me explore with you how this is done in different software tools and the reason that you'll need to do this is based on the types of options that apply to a task that you need to perform sometimes you need to work in the map view sometimes you want to work inside the document view the sub-bullets mentioned how to do this in frame-maker x metal or oxygen by going through the toolbars however you also have a couple of other approaches that you can take in frame-maker the very top set of icons you'll see that there's a small toolbar that represents it did a map and inside it near the middle is a small sheet of paper with an eyeball icon when you click it it switches over to the document view then the toolbar goes away and what you'll see across the top of your frame-maker window is all of your menus file at it and so on and then eventually window and help a small set of icons and then one that will switch over to the resource manager it looks like a small structure tree in x-metal you use the file menu and you have to go through file and switch to the XML view or click on file and switch to the map editor and if you are trying to switch to the XML view of the map make sure you click the file that is in the resource manager not the file that is located at the very top of the x-metal window when you have a map you're in the map view you're working with what's called the resource manager lastly in oxygen you can come along and you can right mouse click inside the tab of a map and you can toggle to open it in the data maps manager view so there's different ways that you can do this I'll show a little bit later on on changing the map view all the information that I've given you so far is great when it comes to creating a map but maps on their own and topics on their own are pretty much useless you want to be able to publish content and distribute it to different audiences I mentioned how you can do this in framemaker x metal and oxygen and i'll expand on it a little bit inside the demo you can do a straight file saved in a map as in frame-maker there's also an option under file to publish and under did up to create content using the open toolkit in Ex metal and oxygen the toolkit is used behind the scenes or you're using style sheets and in order to access it in XML you would choose file generate output for and you'll see the dialog in a few moments and in oxygen under data maps you would do your configure transformation you're also very likely going to want to be able to reorganize information it's unlikely that the first time you place any material inside a map it's going to be absolutely perfect especially with more complex Maps or as you make edits and you start to understand more about what the content is that you're going to be delivering if you're going to reorganize a map I suggest first you close any output that you may have previously generated especially if it's a PDF document so that you can regenerate and overwrite the old files you can drag and drop to rearrange information or you can use icons on toolbars and the three toolbars with the arrows showing are from framemaker x metal and oxygen and you'll see that they're almost identical then you would reorganize your topics so what I'm going to do is take the map and reorganize it with the ID of something along what you see here it may not be 100% the same but I'm going to have main and subordinate topics you can see a representation on-screen in the background is the frame-maker work with maps did a map and it has main map creating published Maps that's the title and then in it there's a primary concept that introduces things multiple tasks and one task has a supporting reference the exact same information the exact same map is represented in the foreground and the data Maps manager dialog and that's from oxygen and you'll find that all three software tools again have a very similar approach to displaying this type of information as you reorganize information it's nice to be able to republish it so that you can see what the results are again I'll show you some demonstrations in a moment let's take a few minutes to move into the next portion of the demo where I'm going to reorganize maps inside frame ax metal and oxygen and I'm going to change the map view in frame x metal and oxygen and then publish using framemaker x metal and oxygen so that you get a chance to see a little bit of each of these in framemaker first select one of the objects that's inside the map and then use the four arrows in order to move it down up left right it's pretty straightforward and you just continue to click arrows it may not seem like a big deal to just click the arrows to move it around you can also drag and drop to rearrange them but in doing so you're actually changing the structure of your entire documentation and that would be reflected in any output you generate table of contents and navigation structure for a website etc aside from moving it just up or just down you can also demote or promote information as you push information further to the right you're demoting it so that it will go from a heading one to a heading two to a heading three and so on frame-maker also lets you select multiple topics in the map so I can click on the first task then I'll control click on the last one when I click the arrow to demote them towards the right they'll all move in as a subordinate of the concept on data maps and the reference on publish outputs will still remain as a subordinate of the last task where I talk about how to publish a map I've reorganized a map now I'm going to click that icon of the sheet of paper with an eyeball by the way if you do this and you've modified the map you're likely prompted to save it I'm going to click in front of the word maps in the create and publish maps in order to edit the title the default title which read map title could have been highlighted at any point in time by doing this exact same method and you would type in your custom title whatever it happens to be I've already done that but I forgot to put in the word data so I'm going to add it now a few keystrokes later I've updated my title keep a good eye on the top of the screen I've got my menu it ends with things like window and help and then a couple of icons I'm going to click and toggle back to the resource manager to close out framemaker I'm going to go in and show you a little bit about how I can save the data map in different formats so I click file I'm going to take the data map and save the data map as something else I've already done a bunch of work inside this folder so you can see there's a lot of different files but at the bottom where I have save as type and it currently reads XML comma data map I'm going to click the drop down in here there's multiple options but there's only two that I want to really focus on one is the composite document that will create a single framemaker document from your map and it will have things like a main level title and title sub so you'll have a title one two and three you would end up having these titles based on the hierarchy of the map but it's one single file there's also a book 2015 with FM components start off book and what that one will create is multiple documents for each highest level object that's inside your map you will end up with a chapter and depending on how you do the configuration inside an ini file that is available to you all kinds of configuration can be set you'll end up with things like titles you'll end up with tables of contents list of figures index you can decide if you want to chop up the files into smaller parts or if you want to make them into larger chapters if you're interested in more information the end of the video has my contact information send me an email message we can set up a call and explore in a little bit more detail exactly how all of this configuration is done it's very powerful it's great for creating PDF content it's a really good source for online material but Adobe does also give you other publishing options for online especially let's take a look at some of those as well canceling out of the save data map as I'm going to go back and click file Adobe frame-maker also allows you to publish Adobe's made it easy to publish to outputs like responsive html5 mobile apps epubs and all types of other formats if you want more information on how to configure these and how to work with data again my contact information is at the end of the video and if you do want to use just the data open toolkit in order to generate your output Adobe's even built-in support for this you just click on data and at the bottom generate Diderot key output this would mean that you'd have to setup style sheets and do configuration again I can work with you on that my contact information into the video default formats include those that are supported by the data open toolkit moving on let's take a look at how X metal handles reorganizing information again I'm going to open a map and click on one of the references the one called publish output formats I click the down arrow in order to move it down underneath reorganize a map each subsequent click moves it down if you have to move it a lot you may want to consider doing a click and drag instead just like in frame-maker I can click the arrow key pointing to the right in order to demote it I'll click on add topics to a map I can't select multiple topics here the way I do in frame-maker but I can quickly click demote in order to move it over and place it under overview of maps then I repeat the pattern and click a topic and use the arrow I had to skip ahead after a while that gets to be a little annoying so instead click and drag in order to reorganize information inside a map I'm going to take publish a map and drag it up under reorganize a map now watch carefully I want to see a black line under reorganize a map rather than a highlight on reorganize and what it'll do is place it equal to reorganise with a black line or if I was to drag and drop it into the middle of the word to reorganize a map which I won't but if I was to do that it would place it as a subordinate so it's very quick drag drop rearrange watch for the black line all right let's go in under the file menu this is where I switch to the XML view of the map again depending on the type of task that you're trying to perform sometimes you want to work inside the document view and sometimes you want to be in the resource manager this view is really helpful when you're working with things like rel tables which we won't show you in this video but we'll discuss it and it's addressed in a video on its own to toggle back I click file and then underneath switch to map editor remember earlier I mentioned about two different places where the file menu exists make sure that in the resource manager when you're ready to publish you click file within this choose generate output for did a map in the resulting dialog take a look at all the choices that are available in the deliverable type there are multiple different formats that you'll see available under the deliverable type happy to work with you on customizing any of these again my contact information is at the very end of the presentation and finally let's go over to oxygen and show you a familiar idea I select topics and I click on the arrows I move content up and down in order to treat it as an equal or I use the arrows in order to demote or promote structurally this changes everything all of the content is going to end up as a heading 1 or a heading 2 it's going to appear with a different layout in the table of contents it may have a different navigation system and any online help or website and just as I can with the other software tools instead of using the arrows I can drag and drop this time I drop directly into publish a map and therefore publish output formats is inserted as a subordinate like in framemaker I can click one and shift-click further down in order to select a range this makes it nice and quick to demote all of these under overview of maps oxygen has a second set of icons located just above those four arrows I'm going to use that to toggle my view I'll click and open the map in the editor aside from using icons or menus I can also right mouse click in oxygen inside the title where it reads work with maps did a map then I'll open this in the data Maps manager view if the map doesn't automatically close you can always close it at any time by clicking the X next to the name there's also an icon above the arrows and it looks a little bit like a wrench let's go and click on it the configure transformation scenarios dialog box allows you to select one or more types of outputs to generate as you click in the dialog check marks appear and then you would click apply associated this will then generate the output that you've specified so in all three software tools I've shown you within Maps how to go in reorganize information toggle the view and publish content I've shown you how to reorganize information in a map so that you have primary and secondary technically parent and child topics inside the map there is some automatic linking that's going to happen between the parent and the child let's go and explore this in online content the link is automatically created in almost every online environment between the parent and the child you can expand on how it does this through the use of attributes almost everything in the map all the topic graphs are going to have a collection type attribute this includes options for things like unordered sequence choice and family and I want to show you what happens in a small way when you go in and you start to tweet these the default when it comes to publishing having a parent and child is that the tool is going to create the link it's going to output the format and it may include things like the title the short description and the link up and down between those now this is pretty cool this is the default publishing this is just one sample of output all I did was I created titles and short descriptions and I created a map with a bit of a hierarchy but because overview of maps is my primary topic and create a map add topics to a map reorganize a map and publish a map are all subordinates they automatically get inserted inside this help page you can see that create a map add topics reorganize and publish a map are in blue that's the title and underneath it is the short description that's all automatically generated in the actual overview of maps file if you recall way back when I created that in frame-maker all I did was I typed in the title overview of maps the short description of the map element describes the relationship among a set of resources such as data topics and I added a paragraph but a published time a whole bunch of extra information is added navigating down into create a map you can see that the title create a map is there most did a software etc there's also the parent topic overview of maps and if I hover over that the short description from the parent topic overview of maps pops up on screen and again that's automatically done because of my use of the map with parent and child and my use of a title and a short description almost everything you see here had minimal typing a title and a short description with the exception of overview of maps where I added one paragraph jumping to publish a map and you can see that the title appears the short description and the subordinate of publish output formats is automatically inserted with a map can be converted to a range of file types and there's also the link up to the parent topic overview of maps and of course when you hover over it gives you the pop up of the short description minimal effort on my end but in the publish I have a very solid prototype that I can show others you know to give them a good idea of exactly what they'll see inside the document the piece that is primarily missing right now is the core body for all of these topics but as far as a prototype goes this is pretty solid the default at the highest level was to only link to the subordinates and it basically displayed them in no specific sequence I'm going to change the topography and use the collection type in order to set this up as a sequence and that means that the child topics will be ordered as links from first to second to third so we'll see things like a 1 2 3 4 however there's also things such as a choice family sequence which I've just mentioned an unordered that is available and it depends on which tool you're using how you apply these but the general idea of what they do is pretty much exactly the same for example if collection type is set up to be treated as a sequence then I still get my map overview of maps I still get my short description the map element I still get my paragraph maps consist of but instead of seeing unnumbered titles for create a map etc and short descriptions I actually get a one two three and a four in front of them and as I work my way through the topics a couple of other interesting things have happened if I jump into for example add topics to a map which in my table of contents you can see has a parent of overview of maps and it has a previous topic create a map and a next topic of reorganize a map that same information is displayed inside the actual topic and again that's automatically created and of course if you were to hover over one of those the pop up would show you the short description related directly to the title so it gives you a bit of a preview before you click the link of what you're in for so let's relatively quickly go in take a look at how we would update the attributes in frame x metal and oxygen and again what's the result of the publishing in framemaker I select the concept I right mouse clicking at the bottom I edit attributes I click the drop-down next to collection type and choose sequence in x-metal pretty much the exact same approach I move over to the concept the overview of maps and I right-click then I choose element properties and if this dialog looks a little familiar it should remember earlier when we were adding topics to the map the topic reference properties dialog appears here I've gone in and just right mouse click in order to open it up again so that I can manipulate some of the attributes and their values in order to assign sequence I'm going to go to the tab marked other attributes then I click the drop down for collection type and if it's starting to feel familiar that all of the tools support the functions in slightly different ways but the idea is exactly the same you're absolutely right in oxygen I go to overview of maps I right click and edit properties and in the dialog I see collection type and if you're taking bets I'm willing to accept the cache that underneath the collection type you're going to see sequence and there it is I click sequence and in any of the three different software tools when I publish they're going to create output which if properly configured is going to show me things like a 1 2 3 4 in online environments of course in a PDF document that may not necessarily need the same configuration so you can actually get different output based on things like the collection type being recognized or ignored dependent on the delivery with sequence I end up overview of maps with four subordinates and I click publish a map in my online output I get an automatic link to the subordinate of course but I also have a link to the parent and because of the sequence the previous topic again this is in the online PDF may not necessarily need the exact same configuration PDF is usually paper-based flipped from one page to the next and therefore things like this don't carry as much value so let's look at the PDF for all three outputs here it is from framemaker there is no link to the parent or child there's nothing inserted because of the sequence you'll notice that the short description does have a gray background in order to make it stand out which is great for reviewers to let them know that that is initial placeholder content of course in a finished publish template I'd go in and I'd configure it so that the content looks exactly the same as all of the other paragraphs or maybe I would give it a minor difference such as making it bold or italic all of the formatting that you see 100% configurable PDF out of XML generates a table of contents shows me the materials does not have any links parent-child or sequence based the exact same thing in the oxygen PDF because this is a print friendly medium there's no need to waste paper by having all kinds of extra content linking back and forth between topics that are the flip of a page away instead in the PDF content you have all of the text and in the online content you have all of the online navigation tools and that includes the support for things like the parent and child navigation as well as the sequence let's close this out with two last topics one is developing a rel table this is building additional navigation structures what if you're creating online content but the default link between parent and child doesn't quite do what you need that's where the rel table comes into play let's go explore the relationship table the rel table element builds a tool into place that specifies relationships between topics it's based on a familiar table model you have rows columns and cells and then you add content in order to set up a basic rel table for a map you would reorganize the map to a simple layout so that it's easy to demonstrate the function if you have too many parent and child relationships it starts to get pretty tricky to try to understand which link is being generated because of parent and child and which link is being generated because of the relationship table there are entire full-time jobs based on the idea of being able to manage maps and relationship tables so don't make it overly complex start with a nice standard flat type of a structure here I have a main topic the concept on data maps and all tasks and references are equal underneath it and if I was to publish this and then review all of the links with the online outputs I'd see that the link exists from the concept did a maps into all of the tasks and references and from the tasks and references back into the concept data map that's it hopefully that makes sense after what you've seen so far the link between parent and child exists nothing else so the large graphic here shows the output of overview of maps and it has links to each of five children create a map add topics to a map reorganize map publish a map and publish output formats in the background you can see a couple of those and they only link just to the parent topic that's the default parent and child and before you put the work in to building a relationship table look for the logical links that might already exist the parent and child the idea of setting up a collection type with unordered sequence choice or family maybe based on your output you're not going to see all of them displayed for example PDF doesn't show you this online help does is it enough and if not then start thinking about the rel table the details associated around developing rel tables will differ based on the tool you're using you'll see that framemaker and x metal and oxygen take different approaches in a short map it's often easy to just add it at the end if you have a much larger you could put it near the related content so that it's a little easier to manage I'm gonna work with a simple map and because they are part of the map a nested map would still have a rel table so if you ever get to the situation where you're putting a map inside a map imagine you're writing about Canada in the United States of America and Mexico and then you want to combine them together into a larger map on North America which contains the map on Canada the map on the USA the map on Mexico as you take the map for Canada and you build a rail table it will automatically be a part of the North America map so as soon as you publish the North America map it inherits all the links in the rel table for Canada plus any map references that are built in for USA plus any that are built in for Mexico and if in the larger map you also create additional links they'll be there as well so again maps and realm tables can get very complex very quickly it is nice if you can keep all the components all the data pieces that you're linking to in the same map where you have a rail table it just makes it a little easier to look at it and work with it and again will express the idea here but I'm not going to show you anything too complex rail tables can be set up in a couple of different ways generally behind the scenes the code might say there's a rail table and it has a header that identifies the first and the second and the third column in this case the first one is type of task the second is concept the third is reference and then the rail rows are on the next slide but end up thinking through this as a three column table and in the first one you talked about tasks the second concept and the third one reference and you don't have to put content into every single cell let's go take a look at some of the rail rows inside one row of the rel table I have three cells one of them is in black because it doesn't have anything remember I also said think about the three columns so the first one is just tasks the second is a set of concept and the third is a collection of any references here I have two tasks create a map and publish a map and I want both of them to be aware that they should link to publish outputs which is a reference and the reference should link back to both tasks this is one representation this is what it might look like in framemaker in the first column for tasks I have the to create a map and publish a map the two tasks and continuing across inside that row I have no concepts at these point too but they will point to the publish output formats which in turn will publish and link back to the two tasks if the output format supports it so I wouldn't see it generally speaking in a PDF but I will definitely see it in online help and if I tweak my PDF then it may actually have links between them as well so those possibilities all exist it depends on what you set up and what you decide you want when it comes time to publish and to stay fair this is the x-metal representation of the exact same information and here's what that sample rel table might look like inside oxygen each of the tools represents the same idea and here's what the resulting content for those subordinates might look like when a rel table is included notice this time the tasks on create a map the tasks on publish both have a link to each other to the other related tasks and both of them have a link to the related reference and the publish output formats which is the reference has a set of related tasks that it points back to now this is in an online environment I actually like having the rel table output included inside PDF the default parent and child links I usually don't put those into the PDF it's pretty easy for somebody to flip to the next page in the next page or the previous page in the previous but these links could end up being related links that point throughout the documentation and therefore my PDF the related tasks for that reference may not just be a hyperlink away it may not just be a page flip forward and back it is possible that in the output that I create I have a finished reference that reads publish output formats a map can be converted etcetera I don't have a link to the parent topic because somebody can just flip to the previous page but I do have something that reads related tasks create a map page 7 publish a map page 32 and the publish output formats might be on page 68 so this now gives me a way to create a very structured organized way of linking from one piece of information to the other that goes beyond the parent and child but as you can imagine there is a lot of management that's involved in making the right decisions when it comes to building a rel table when it comes to developing rel tables again each of the three different tools has a slightly different approach you often add it at the end of a map and you should try to keep all the data components in the same map if you have a rel table to make it easier on yourself especially early on when it comes to managing content lastly let's take a couple of minutes to talk about additional map level attributes and some of the things that you should think about when building your Maps often you want to create unique content for an audience product or platform and give them specific output or you may have information that should be included for print or for online or something that you may want to exclude from a table of contents all of this can be done through the use of attributes in regards to your topic graphs if you want a lot of information on additional map level functions pause this part of the video and give it a read through I'll talk about it quickly topic graphs can contain a collection type attribute which we've talked about it can have a processing role where it's normal and it just appears as a would or a resource only it's only there for the convenience of managing the map linking it could be a target a source it can normally link back and forth or it could have no links table of contents TOC do you want it or not print you want it or not or is it print only search yes or no do you include or exclude in searching a lot of capability here there's some map level attributes that can even be used inside topics for example the attribute for product or platform or audience you can have a paragraph where you say the product is framemaker or x-metal and off and therefore the paragraph would be intended for one specific type of a product only when it's delivered so product would be the name of the product platform is the operating system or the hardware audience would be the intended audience if you've set up content in order to have product or platform or audience types of settings you can combine the maps with the attributes and use something called a valet did a Val file to publish just what you need and I'll talk about it and relate it back to what we just looked at where we had product audience platform a Val file can feel pretty complex at first but if you look at the basics of it it's actually a really simple statement that just identifies what to include or exclude and how if at all to format some content that ends up being included this file is a little bit of a complex one it has all kinds of properties in it so instead of looking at all of the options let's narrow it down to just one or two to make this easy I'm going to talk about one specific property inside the valve file where the action is to include anything where the attribute of audience has a specific value of everybody and that doesn't really restrict it in the context of what I've been talking about because I've been talking about how framemaker works how x-metal works how oxygen works so let's look at a Ditto Val file that talks about those three specific types of information because remember I could have a paragraph where the product is framemaker I could have a section where the audience is novice user I could have a document or platform is Windows putting together different combinations and using a vowel file lets me publish very specific information as a nice clean example I'm running documentation on how many different map tools work I'm writing it for framemaker I'm writing it for x-metal I'm writing it for oxygen and I may want to have some topics that on a map level I identify as having product equals framemaker or product as x-metal or product as oxygen and then I want to create a conditional file I want to have a Val for each of them and this is what they might look like and you're gonna see some that are a lot cleaner and a lot easier to understand if I want just framemaker and nothing else I could create this document it's an XML file it's a Val and it has three sets of properties it has an action to include the product when it's set to framemaker and exclude the product of x-metal and exclude the product of oxygen here's another vowel file this one's just for XML so it's going to include the product x-metal and exclude the other two this should make a little more sense now and of course you can probably guess what the oxygen one is going to look like it's an XML document it has a Val where the property action includes that to be the product of oxygen and to exclude x-metal and exclude frame-maker let's sum this up and I'll give you some information on how to contact me if you have further questions or if you're looking to evaluate these products and starting to make your migration to did up and you need some help early on before you do any work with the software take the time to plan take the time to outline build your map identify what your goal is what kind of content you have what kind of content you need and start to create some basic topics include things like a title and a short description build your map there will be basic linking automatically insert it between parent and child if you need additional lengths that are not direct parent and child take advantage of rel tables and as you build Maps be aware that any of the topic rafts that you insert in a map can have attributes for things like product and then by using a did of Alf I'll you can publish a map identify a did a Val file to use and create just the content for framemaker just the content for x-metal just the content for oxygen for a user guide using the map that I have so far I've created some general ideas I've shown you a little bit of how this map is developed what kind of information goes into it you can build the basic map you can insert basic linking you can even use it to guide you on the conversation around the rel table the attributes and the date of Alf Isles demonstrations of those are going to be available in another video but the hands-on demo so far should give you the opportunity to create a map manage the topics within it publish the content and get a little bit more comfortable working with any or all of these software tools an optional next step is to contact us for services we help clients in creating content managing that content delivering it in multiple formats socializing the message listening to what it is that the audience has to say and then improving the way that they work it's what we do with our own content and it's what we do when we help our clients we really help clients write less but write better through a broad range of services this is my contact information your best bet is to send me an email Bernard app publishing smarter com if I don't reply within about 24 hours it could be that I'm traveling if I don't reply within about 48 to 72 hours feel free to call the number that's my home phone number so you're sure to be able to reach me or to leave a message for me you can also contact me through my LinkedIn profile on Twitter by following and tweeting to at publish smarter or by visiting our website I hope this video has helped you gain a better understanding of a data map and the components that go into it and the capabilities of the map to help you create the right content for the right audience and the right formats and deliver it at the right time so that they can do their job and not have the documentation be any type of an obstacle documentation should always be seen as something that supports the end goal of the user it makes it easier for them to get to that goal thanks again