Customize which attributes show up in Element Properties dialog?

[schwamkrug]

In XMetaL 8.0, is there a way for us to customize which attributes show up in the Element Properties dialog? Right now, it's only displaying a small subset of attributes. We'd like to add some additional attributes (and possibly remove some as well).

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[Derek Read]

Our UI designer made the choice to show “commonly used” attributes for most elements in this dialog in order to simplify things for most people. There is no simple config file that controls this, so changes would need to be made to some scripts that make up part of the DITA authoring customization.

The Attribute Inspector shows all attributes for all DITA elements, except @class, @xtrc, and @xtrf, which are hidden by default (for good reason).

If you need to work with @class for some reason it can be enabled in the DITA Options dialog (Tools > DITA Options) by enabling the checkbox labeled “Allow editing DITA specialization attributes”.

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[schwamkrug]

I see. Thanks for the info. Does this thread serve well enough as a request to make this configurable in a future release? Ideally, we'd be able to provide which attributes we want in that dialog and also be able to override that on an element-by-element basis.

Is this something I could hack myself if I dug around in the Javascript code, with the understanding that it's an unsupported hack?

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[Derek Read]

This is something you could try to hack in yourself yes, keeping in mind your caveat. The majority of the significant code that drives our XFT dialogs for DITA authoring is externalized inside JS files. Any text editor should let you mess with those. There is some code inside some of the XFT files themselves so if that needs modification then the XMetaL Forms Toolkit would be required.

I'll bring a request for making these dialogs configurable up with development. I think this is just one XFT dialog that morphs based on the currently selected element.

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