Process for Creating a Structured Frame Application

[Steve Rickaby]

My 10c...

At 15:38 -0400 30/5/07, ActionA at aol.com wrote:

>After printing out the 600+ manual entitled Structured  Application
>Developer's Guide, I believe I have the general gist of what needs to be done.

Sheesh - just printing it enabled you to grok it? That's fast work... ;-)

>Since it appears that some of you on this list have a great deal of  experience with Structured Frame, I thought I'd run this by you before I submit my findings to my supervisor:
>
>1. Convert the unstructured Frame documents by:
>a. Creating a conversion table
>b. Once I apply the  conversion table to the unstructured files, I need to
>manually tweak the document to finish any left over problems.
>
>2. Create an EDD from the existing schema from our XML publishing  system.

I think you have these slightly the wrong way around: you cannot really know what your conversion tables should contain without an EDD [or a DTD]. More to the point, you cannot run the tables without first importing the EDD into the document, else the required element definitions won't exist.

>If I have this right, the schema will provide the EDD with the  structure for
>the documents, but then I have to add the formatting portion to the EDD as
>well as read/write rules for importing/exporting.
>
>So, am I on the right track? Am I missing anything?

Yes almost. I'm not sure whether you're using 'schema' in the abstract, but I think you mean a DTD. In FrameMaker the EDD serves the function of a DTD in defining structure, but it also defines rules that control how FrameMaker's styling domain is applied to a document, for example by specifying the paragraph tags to be applied to specific elements, and under what circumstances (contexts).

>There is one more thing I'm not sure of: Do I need a DTD as well? If  so,
>what is that used for?

Not as well. If you have an existing DTD, you have a good starting point for an EDD, because FrameMaker allows you to create an EDD from a DTD. The resulting EDD will correctly reflect the document structure(s) defined by the DTD, and you can then flesh it out with rules to control the physical presentation of the document(s) in FrameMaker. [Or not, as you wish.]

>In case this is important,  in our XML publishing system, we have  a schema,
>an XSLT file that sets up the conversion of the XML docs to HTML, and  a
>cascading style sheet.

You have a great start, then ;-)

-- 
Steve