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Dave Carver: XInclude Support in 0.5M6

The upcoming XSL Tooling0.5M6 milestone is going to have many user interface improvements. It's starting to bring the XSL editing support that many other xsl tools have had for a while. One item that will be of interest to those that are working with Docbook or DITA related files will be a XInclude ANT Task contributed by Lars Vogel. This will allow for the merging of XML files that have the XInclude include element in them.


In the XSL Tooling project, all of our help is created in Docbookformat, and documented in several different Docbook files. We have a build process that uses an enhanced version of the eclipse.xsl styelsheet included with the Docbook Project, that generates the toc.xml, plugin.xml, and html files. The plan is to release the enhanced eclipse stylesheet along with a docbook specific project plugin for the XSL support.

For those working with DITA and Docbook files, there will also be two new content-types under the XML content-type. DITA with support for extensions of dita and ditamap, and Docbook with support for dbk or docbook extensions.

Once the Docbook styelsheets are approved, we'll look at getting the DITA-OTapproved for inclusion as well. This way the eclipse Web Tools project should have an easier way to regenerate their documentation, instead of depending on one company to regenerate the information.

Dave Carver: Generating Eclipse Help from Docbook

A while ago Chris Aniszczyk and Lawrence Mandel wrote an article for eclipse corner titled "Authoring With Eclipse". This is a very good article that uses several freely available pluginsto allow creating and authoring of PDF, HTML and other formats from Docbook. I recently discovered the joys of Docbookas I was working on converting some guidelines for work into multiple formats. Being able to separate content from the presentation is a great benefit when you have to support multiple output formats.



Docbook includes a stylesheet for generating eclipse help system files. This is described in detail by Jirka Koreskain "DocBookfor Eclipse" . The screen shot shown is the XSLLaunch configuration for generating the appropriate files, using the XSLTooling project. There is one issue, and that is by default, it will output the plugin.xml, and toc.xmlto whatever the working directory is, and not the base. dir.

There are several ways to address this:

1. Create a Customization layer for the eclipse.xslfile, so that the plugin.xmland toc.xmlare placed in the pluginproject directly. Either through a new variable or modifying the templates directly.

2. The other option is to add support in the XSLLaunch Configuration to specify the working directory. Bug 221042suggests just this very thing.

3. Create a build.xml file that generates the file. This allows for inclusion of XIncludes and additional post processing beyond what the XSL Launch configuration allows.

Option 2 is needed anyways, when dealing with the exslt:document function, which allows outputingmultiple documents during one transformation process. Otherwise they end up in whatever is the current working directory, and this usually isn't a project directory in your workspace.

The Docbookeclipse stylesheetdoes need a few updates, but it works very well as is (once you move the files to the correct directories). There are some open request for both DITA and Docbooksupport within the XSLTooling project. We've already had our first code contribution from Lars Vogelto allow us to support XInclude,and also have an ANT Task. Look for this to be hopefully added in 0.5M6.

Updated 03/02/08 to correct the spelling of Chris's last name.