Reply To: Plain text tab disabled

[Derek Read]

We disable Plain Text view for the Documentum integration in case the Documentum DocApp being used uses Documentum's “chunking” feature. It is necessary to stay in TagsOn or Normal view in order to properly track changes made to the various “chunks” that make up a particular document and pass that information along to Documentum.

It is possible to turn Plain Text view back on. However, this can be dangerous. The basic requirement is that none of your DocApps can use the Documentum “chunking” feature.

You will also need to be cautious when making changes in Plain Text view because modifying Documentum-specific attributes that the CMS relies on could potentially break check in, check out, versioning and possibly other things. These attributes can be made invisible and / or read only in TagsOn and Normal view (which is done), but this is impossible in Plain Text view, where anything goes and the entire document is basically what you see is what will be saved to disc, character for character.

It is also very easy to put a document into an invalid state in Plain Text view because “Rules Checking” is not available in that view: any element, attribute, and attribute value can be inserted anywhere and even things not defined in the DTD can be inserted and far worse. You will only know the document is invalid if you force validation (using F9 or by attempting to switch to TagsOn or Normal view).

The CMS connectors we provide (Documentum, SharePoint, FileNet, and any others, including future ones) and those provided by our CMS partners will generally disable Plain Text view for similar reasons.

If having access to Plain Text view is a true requirement for your authors I would recommend contacting XMetaL Support directly for instructions by submitting a support case. You should then be fully aware of the caveats above, do your own testing in the context of your own system, and possibly provide special training to make sure your authors are aware of the potential to “break” documents stored in your CMS and how to avoid doing that (what not to touch). You may also wish to only enable this view for certain “advanced” authors, or maybe people in an admin-like position in order to reduce the number of problems enabling this view has the potential to unleash.

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