Table Problems (Cell Shading and Default Format from EDD and Template)

Question

I have two problems related to tables using Structured FrameMaker (Version 10), whilst in-processing XML.
I've designed two different table formats in my Template; Format A with black shading - 30% for THead and 3% for row, and Format B with blue shading - 30% for THead and 3% for row.
If I create a structured document from scratch and insert a table, I get the required Black (30%) and Black (3%) shading.   If I then insert an informaltable, I get the required Blue (30%) and Blue (3%) shading.
Although I've given the two table types different default formats in the EDD - Format A for table and Format B for informaltable - when I open the XML file (normally) from within FrameMaker I notice that all the tables default to Format A (black shading).   When I then import my EDD table should stay as Format A and informaltable should change to Format I.   This doesn't happen; they all stay at Format A.
I can change informaltable by manually applying Format I, this worksI.  Obviously, with long documents which might have hundreds of tables we can't afford the time and manpower to do such things one at a time by hand.
Do any of the Structure gurus have a fix for this, or can someone give me a hint of what I might be doing wrong?
The second, but related question was a general one.   I see that Adobe says
"Tables
FrameMaker table formats are only partially integrated with the structure model. The content of
a FrameMaker table is always fully structured, but the control over cell border ruling is limited and
there is no structure format control over cell shading."
I believe it could be useful to apply cell shading on an individual cell basis (although I'm not sure whether this is possible at the XML level - where someboddy might give an element an attribute of, say, shading (with options, such as, green, red, blue, yellow all at, say, 30%, with a default of red, for example.
I've seen that there has been mention of plugins to achieve cell shading in structure; does anyone have an experience with such things, more to the point, can anyone point me in the right direction?   I don't mind paying fo a solution which I can implement myself.
Any help or advice would be much appreciated.
Regards
Chris

Answer 1

Hi,
could you please provide some details on the EDD, RWR and some example XML?
My wild guess goes into the direction of the RWR not containing enough information that get written out into XML.
We're using table formatting with shaders too (using an attribute to control the specific formatting of each table) and it works like a charm in FM9 and FM11 when roundtripping.
The context rules are used in the table group (i.e. tgroup element). This might already solve the issue .
Cheers Alex