Conditional text: It can't be this hard

Question

This should be so simple, yet I fear a dearth of solutions.
I built a big, fat pdf deliverable for a client using structured Frame 9/DITA. They're tickled pink. Now they want, for a difference audience, a book composed of only the tasks. No concepts or reference topics. I'll want to include the "topic" topics because they're what I used for the chapter titles and brief intro blurb. Other than that, just the tasks, ma'am.
My own requirement is that the process must be automated. Manually setting attributes on every topic I want or don't want doesn't cut it. While I don't mind doing some manuaI labor initially, I need a way that the client can generate this book automatically, going forward. It really shouldn't be so hard to just exclude all concepts and ref topics, or to include only topics and tasks. But the only way I can find to do this is by filtering by attribute, which means manually setting attributes every time. Although I haven't gotten very creating with attributes, I don't know of a way you can automatically set a particular attribute value every time the element is used.
Ideas?

Answer 1

larose7 wrote:
This should be so simple, yet I fear a dearth of solutions.
I built a big, fat pdf deliverable for a client using structured Frame 9/DITA. They're tickled pink. Now they want, for a difference audience, a book composed of only the tasks. No concepts or reference topics. I'll want to include the "topic" topics because they're what I used for the chapter titles and brief intro blurb. Other than that, just the tasks, ma'am.
My own requirement is that the process must be automated. Manually setting attributes on every topic I want or don't want doesn't cut it. While I don't mind doing some manuaI labor initially, I need a way that the client can generate this book automatically, going forward. It really shouldn't be so hard to just exclude all concepts and ref topics, or to include only topics and tasks. But the only way I can find to do this is by filtering by attribute, which means manually setting attributes every time. Although I haven't gotten very creating with attributes, I don't know of a way you can automatically set a particular attribute value every time the element is used.
Ideas?
I haven't worked with structured FM in a long time, and never did anything with DITA or filtering by attributes, so this might just be a wild shot:
If there's some consistency to the items you want to tag with one or the other condition, you might be able to use a combination of Edit > Copy > Special to copy a condition from a sample to which it's applied, and Find/Replace > By Pasting, to apply the copied condition to found instances of the element you want to conditionalize.
HTH
Regards,
Peter
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices