Re: Can any authoring tool directly pick data from the database or XML files?

[sburnf -at- au1 -dot- ibm -dot- com]

Hi Rabia -

I've heard of people doing this sort of thing in FrameMaker using MML.

This is from the introduction to the MML Reference, which is a PDF
in the FrameMaker OnlineManuals directory:

  "FrameMaker® includes support for a markup language called MML 
  (Maker Markup Language). You can use any standard text editor
  to create an MML file. Later, you can open the MML file as a 
  FrameMaker document or import it into a FrameMaker template."

What you would need is a process that writes out each message from
the DB to a text file (called, say, messages.mml) and adds an
appropriate MML tag to each field, so each line might look like this:

<msgid>999<msgtext>A bad thing happened

You import messages.mml to a chapter file in FrameMaker. This is an
otherwise empty Frame document that has the page headers and footers
plus paragraph tags corresponding to <msgid> and <msgtext>. When you
want to update the manual, you just write out the current messages
from the database, open the book in FrameMaker, import the latest
messages.mml, and print to paper or PDF or whatever.

There's a bit more to it but that's the basics. The MML Reference
has samples to help get you started.

FrameMaker imports XML files too, so that's another possible route.

Regards
---
Stuart Burnfield
 
> We need to create a dictionary for the messages in our application
> that users can easily reference... Currently our messages are
> stored in OCX and XML files. These might be stored in the database
> if the need arises. What I need to know is, if there is any tool
> that can directly pick these messages from the database/OCX/XML
> files and enable me to generate a user friendly output with
> minimum work from my side. The core issue is that we do not want
> to maintain a separate set of messages for the dictionary. We
> want the message content to be maintained only in the back end.


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