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Overview of WebHelp DITA-OT Processing Stages

The WebHelp Responsive plugin inherits the multi-stage processing mode from the DITA-OT publishing engine. Each stage in the process examines some or all of the content. Some stages result in temporary files that are used in later steps, while other stages result in updated copies of the DITA content. Most of the processing takes place in a temporary working directory, and the source files themselves are never modified.

The most important steps (Ant targets) in the WebHelp Responsive transformation process are:

whr-init

Creates a set of initializations required by the next processing steps such as: initialize the plugin Java CLASSPATH, load the Oxygen Publishing Template, or set the default values for various properties.

preprocess

This is a step defined in the DITA Open Toolkit processor representing a set of sub-steps that typically runs at the beginning of every DITA-OT transformation. Each step or stage corresponds to an Ant target in the build pipeline; the preprocess target calls the entire set of steps.

whr-detect-lang

Detects the documentation language by looking into the DITA map file. If not detected, it uses the value of the default.language parameter.

whr-collect-indexterms

Collects the index terms from DITA topics and write them in WebHelp Output Directory/index.xml. The index.xml file is used later by the whr-create-indexterms-page step to generate the index terms HTML page (WebHelp Output Directory/indexTerms.html).

whr-create-props-file

Serializes the transformation parameters in XML and JS formats so they can be used in the next XSLT processing steps or JavaScript.

You can read the value of a WebHelp transformation parameter from your XSLT extension stylesheets by using the getParameter(param.name) function from the http://www.oxygenxml.com/functions namespace.

whr-toc-xml

Generates the toc.xml file in the temporary directory.

whr-nav-links

Generates the navigational links for all DITA topics such as menu, table of contents, or breadcrumb links.

whr-context-help-map

Generates the context-help-map.xml file in the output folder. This file is used by the Context-Sensitive WebHelp Responsive system.

whr-sitemap

Generates the sitemap.xml file in the output folder. This file is used for Search Engine Optimization.

whr-copy-resources

Copies all the resources (logo, favicon, JavaScript files, CSS files, etc.) that are needed by the WebHelp transformation to the output folder.

whr-create-topic-pages

Generates an HTML file for each DITA topic.

Implementation is done by running an XSLT transformation that processes the topic layout page with DITA-OT-DIR/plugins/com.oxygenxml.webhelp.responsive/templates/xsl/dita2webhelp/dita2webhelp.xsl XSLT file for all DITA topics. You can extend this step by using the com.oxygenxml.webhelp.xsl.dita2webhelp extension point.

whr-create-main-page

Generates the WebHelp main page (index.html) in the output folder.

Implementation is done by running an XSLT transformation that processes the main layout page with the DITA-OT-DIR/plugins/com.oxygenxml.webhelp.responsive/templates/xsl/mainFiles/createMainPage.xsl XSLT file. You can extend this step by using the com.oxygenxml.webhelp.xsl.createMainPage extension point.

whr-create-search-page

Generates the WebHelp search results page (search.html) in the output folder.

Implementation is done by running an XSLT transformation that processes the search results page with DITA-OT-DIR/plugins/com.oxygenxml.webhelp.responsive/templates/xsl/mainFiles/createSearchPage.xsl XSLT file. You can extend this step by using the com.oxygenxml.webhelp.xsl.createSearchPage extension point.

whr-create-indexterms-page

Generates the WebHelp index terms HTML page (indexTerms.html) in the output folder.

Implementation is done by running an XSLT transformation that transforms the WebHelp Output Directory/index.xml generated by the whr-collect-indexterms step with DITA-OT-DIR/plugins/com.oxygenxml.webhelp.responsive/templates/xsl/mainFiles/createIndextermsPage.xsl XSLT file. You can extend this step by using the com.oxygenxml.webhelp.xsl.createIndexTermsPage extension point.

whr-search-index

Processes the generated HTML (for all DITA topics) to generate an index file. This index is used to implement the WebHelp search function.

Note: The WebHelp Responsive plugin uses the XSLT stylesheets from the DITA-OT HTML5 plugin.