Keith's Blog

[Read this for an introduction to what I’m talking about].

Now that we’ve got our FrameMaker documents in XML, how can we exploit their new format? One of the first things I did was to create new ways of reading (eventually changing) the simple data stored within them. This isn’t all that earth-shattering, but when you consider how difficult it is to find and change some values in the FrameMaker UI this is a big win. Where to start? Bookfiles.

To be able to apply stylesheets or data-collection tools to books (rather than individual files), I need to be able to collect a books components. So, convert your bookfile to MX (yeah, it works on bookfiles as well as chapter files), and search through it for one of the filenames you know is a part of the book (you’ll probably want to pretty-print the XML first). I get something like this:

  <BookComponent>
    <FileName>`&lt;c\&gt;ch01'</FileName>
    <Unique>27107</Unique>
    <StartPageSide>StartRightSide</StartPageSide>
    <PageNumbering>Restart</PageNumbering>
    <PgfNumbering>Continue</PgfNumbering>
    <PageNumPrefix>`'</PageNumPrefix>
    <PageNumSuffix>`'</PageNumSuffix>
    <DefaultPrint>Yes</DefaultPrint>
    <DefaultApply>Yes</DefaultApply>
  </BookComponent>

MX in this case has a pretty comprehensible structure, so we’ll need to grab a BookComponent/FileName, do a little text processing to remove the funky characters, and potentially append our MX file extension (I chose “.mx”). Here’s a very simple stylesheet to do just that:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
                xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="@*|node()">
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:template>  
  
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:element name="components">
      <xsl:apply-templates/>
    </xsl:element>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="//BookComponent/FileName">
    <xsl:param name="extension" select="'.mx'"/>
    <xsl:variable name="str-after">
      <xsl:value-of select="substring-after(., '>')"/>
    </xsl:variable>  
    <xsl:element name="component">
      <xsl:value-of select="substring($str-after,
                                      1, 
                                      string-length($str-after) - 1)"/>
      <xsl:value-of select="$extension"/>
    </xsl:element>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

When you run that on a MX bookfile, you should see an output like this (note that the file extension is customizable above):

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<components>
  <component>svcTOC.fm.mx</component>
  <component>foreword.mx</component>
  <component>ch00.mx</component>
  <component>ch01.mx</component>
  <component>ch02.mx</component>
  <component>ch03.mx</component>
  <component>ch04.mx</component>
  <component>ch05.mx</component>
  <component>ch06.mx</component>
  <component>ch07.mx</component>
  <component>ch08.mx</component>
  <component>ch09.mx</component>
  <component>appa.mx</component>
  <component>appb.mx</component>
  <component>appc.mx</component>
  <component>appd.mx</component>
  <component>appe.mx</component>
  <component>svcIX.fm.mx</component>
  <component>svcAPL.fm.mx</component>
  <component>svcLOR.fm.mx</component>
</components>

That’ll give us a nice structure to direct other processes to the individual component files.

The code is also available here or darcs get http://kfahlgren.com/code/mx/.

[Read this for an introduction to what I’m talking about].

The first step of doing anything useful with MX is the ability to get back out into MIF. Thankfully, this is an entirely trivial job in XSLT.

[This code thanks to my boss, Andrew Savikas.]

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <!-- author: Andrew Savikas, O'Reilly Media -->

  <xsl:output method="text" encoding="ascii"/>
  <xsl:strip-space elements="_facet"/>

  <xsl:template match="/|MIF_ROOT">
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:template>

<!-- This template needs to remain flush left for correct output -->
<xsl:template match="_facet">
<xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="*">
    <xsl:text>&lt;</xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="name()"/> 
    <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
    <xsl:text>&gt;</xsl:text>
    <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
  </xsl:template>
  
</xsl:stylesheet>

The code is also available here or darcs get http://kfahlgren.com/code/mx/.