DOCBOOK-APPS: Including Fragments of other DocBook Documents

[Sagar dot Shah at ubsw dot com]

Hi All,

I would like to be able to include fragments of other docbook documents in the document i'm writing. (to save maintaining information in two places etc. etc.).

I'm sure others on this list will have wanted to do something similar, how have you solved this?

Here i'm not talking about entity inclusions, both the (source) docbook document containing the fragment and the target docbook document are completed docbook documents.

So far i've managed to use Xinlcude and do things along the lines of:

-----
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN" "docbookx.dtd" [
<!ELEMENT xi:include (xi:fallback)>
                  <!ATTLIST xi:include
                      xmlns:xi  CDATA #FIXED "http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude";         
                      href       CDATA                                   #REQUIRED
                      parse      (xml|text)                              "xml"
                      encoding   CDATA                                   #IMPLIED
                  >
<!ELEMENT xi:fallback ANY>
                  <!ATTLIST xi:fallback
                      xmlns:xi   CDATA #FIXED   "http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude";
                  >
]>

<article>
  <articleinfo>
    <title>Test</title>
    <author>
      <firstname>Sagar</firstname>
      <surname>Shah</surname>
    </author>

  </articleinfo>

  <section id="MyFirstSection">
    <title>foo</title>
    <para>la la</para>  
    <xi:include href="docbook-tech-support-1.dbk#xpointer(id('OtherIssues'))"/> 
  </section>
</article>
-----------

This all works fine :-) ... but it's dissappointing to have to define the xinclude elements manually in every document.

I could go one better by defining them in a second DTD and including that dtd as an entity, but it still doesn't sound absolutely perfect. Is this how others using xinclude have gone about it?

Does DocBook have more 'native' support for acomphising this task? would it make sense to define the xinclude elements in DocBook? (probably not but i thought i'd ask anyway ;-) Or is there another way i could acompish the inclusion of sections from other documents?

Any help or insight people could provide would be much appreciated.

Regards

Sagar Shah

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