Import/Export Clients

[Lynne A. Price]

Rick,
   Custom import/export clients are very common, although XSLT has made the 
need for them less frequent. Two types of customizations are needed:

1) Those that depend only on the element structure (e.g., changing an XML 
Title element to either Table or TableTitle in FrameMaker)

2) Those that require knowledge of FrameMaker formatting details (e.g., 
where page or line breaks fall, or mapping between a FrameMaker formatting 
property (such as font size) and an attribute.

Tasks in category 1 are by far more frequent and can be handled either by 
XSLT or the FDK, although XSLT is becoming more frequent. (A pitfall is 
that without a category 2 tool, a round-trip through XSLT does not preserve 
variables and text insets.)

I think FrameScript support of both categories would be a great 
enhancement. As is true for both XSLT and FDK modifications of default 
import/export behavior, it should only be necessary for the user to specify 
how to map elements and attributes whose processing differs from the 
default as modified by r/w rules.

         --Lynne


At 06:42 PM 9/27/2006, Rick Quatro wrote:
>The FDK has a way to write import/export clients for situations where 
>read/write rules fall short. I wonder how common these clients are in 
>structured FrameMaker applications. Would this be an area where it would 
>useful to have a scripting language, such as FrameScript, do import/export 
>tasks? FrameScript's developer is trying to determine if there is a demand 
>for this kind of functionality in FrameScript. Any feedback would be 
>appreciated. Thanks.


Lynne A. Price
Text Structure Consulting, Inc.
Specializing in structured FrameMaker consulting, application development, 
and training
lprice at txstruct.com            http://www.txstruct.com
voice/fax: (510) 583-1505      cell phone: (510) 421-2284