Reply To: XMetaL 8: Is it possible to override Table menu commands?

[paorear]

I saw a reply to this in email, but it doesn't appear to be showing up in the forum. The text of the reply was:

What is your document type? I'm guessing you are trying to customize the DITA authoring functionality and not creating a customization for your own schema?

If it is DITA then you will have trouble doing this as our DITA authoring customization heavily customizes the built-in Table menu, it also provides custom dialogs for various types of Table editing specific to DITA (we have built-in support for CALS but all of the other types required custom dialogs), and it also customizes quite a few of the other standard menus.

If you want to try to make changes to these things (I cannot recommend that) you would need to start reading all the JScript code our developers have written, and possibly some code in XFT files as well. You would then need to make your changes in there directly, or (better) override the JScript prototype functions they have written (where those exist). Keep in mind that you would need to retest your changes with each release as this part of the system is considered “closed” and making changes to it is unsupported. In addition to not being documented, or supported by XMetaL Support, our developers do not try to keep any of this functionality backward compatible (as they do with our APIs for example).

If you are trying to fix something it would be best to submit a case to XMetaL Support describing the issue so that it can be addressed in a future release if it makes sense to do so.

If you are trying to add a feature it might be useful for other clients, and in that case it would also make sense to submit a case to XMetaL Support describing what you want to add so that it can be considered for a future release.

We are not using DITA and have our own schema, but we are reusing the same table tags which work well overall with the built-in tools. However, when a user selects Insert Caption (even though we have a

element), XMetaL effectively inserts an invisible element and the cursor is placed before the first cell of the table. If the user types it appears as if nothing is happening. If you switch to Plain Text view, you see a element was indeed inserted and any typing that may have happened is getting into the value of the element. If you then switch back to Tags On view, the element appears. It's this generally bad user experience we're trying to address.

If instead of selecting Insert Caption from the table menu, a user simply inserts a element from the Element List all works as expected.

This is a somewhat specific scenario, but overall, it would be really useful to be able to enable/disable/remove menu items from any of the standard menus – this is something anyone extending or customizing XMetaL could benefit from. We've been able to add our own menu and do some nice stuff there, but have little control over any of the other menus.

Thank you!

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