Authoring a System Message Lookup Table in a DITA Reference Topic

[Jeff Haas]

Rather than creating individual topics for system messages, I'm attempting to author a system message lookup table in one DITA reference topic. In XMetaL 6.0, the default reference topic creates a basic table using elements proptypehd/proptype, propvaluehd/propvalue, and propdeschd/propdesc. However, I'm hoping to customize or replace that table with a table that contains the following properties:

– Country
– Language
– Message Set Number
– Message Number
– Message Text
– Message Severity
– Long Description

Should I modify the existing table or create a table of my own? Should I re-use the provided elements or work with other elements such as “Software Elements” msgblock, msgnum, and msgph? Can this be done in a standard DITA reference topic or is some kind of specialization required?

Assuming I succeed in authoring such a table, will a user interface call be able identify a specific system messsage in the lookup table, extract the Message Text from raw, untransformed XML/DITA, and populate the appropriate user interface control with it? 

Thanks for any help you can provide.

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[Derek Read]

What does this need to end up looking like in your final output?

Do any of these items (country, language, etc) need to pull in external data via conref or something (image, text, etc)?

Do any of these items need to link to something (with that link being a link-like thing such as in HTML output for example)?

Trying to get my head around what you are trying to do here.

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[Jeff Haas]

Thanks for your reply.

I solved this problem by deleting the default properties table from the reference topic and creating my own normal table. Basically, I'm not performing the transform myself but providing raw XML/DITA to Development for them to populate standard user assistance controls in the user interface with data from my topics.

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