Reply To: Using DITA properties tables

[Rob Hanna]

I am having a similar problem with Properties. Inside my environment – working with XMetaL and a CMS, I am unable to access the code view from the editor. This seemingly makes it impossible to modify the properties table.

The way that the properties table works is that it is supposed to look for , , or and assemble the table row accordingly within .

For example, the first (row) contains all three , , and . This results in a table with one row containing three cells. Next contains only and . This should result in a two row table with three columns. The first cell spans into the next row. This is how you are supposed to represent two sets of values and descriptions with a single property represented by a property type (Property A).

+—————+——————-+——————+
| Property A    | Value 1            | Desc 1            |
|                    +——————-+——————+
|                    | Value 2            | Desc 2            |
+—————+——————-+——————+

MY PROBLEM
Inserting a properties table using XMetaL automatically inserts a three-column table with headings. I cannot delete the propval column in XMetaL.

My target properties table features only labels (types) and descriptions – there are no values. There are obviously other less semantically accurate markup I can use but I want to use the appropriate and valid DITA content. As stated above, I cannot access the code to manually fix the properties table in the source due to limitations in my environment.

Can you please help me find a workaround!

Cheers,
Rob Hanna

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