This scenario outlines how different authors can effectively remove or modify a link element in a shared topic.
A company wants to use a shared topic for information about customer support. For most products, the shared topic should include a link to a topic about extended warranties. But a small number of products do not offer extended warranties.
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Team one creates the shared topic: customer-support.dita. The topic contains the following mark-up:
<related-links> <link keyref="extended-warranties" href="common/extended-warranties.dita"/> </related-links>
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The teams that need the link to the topic about extended warranties can reference the customer-support.dita topic in their DITA maps. When processed, the related link in the topic resolves to the common/extended-warranties.dita topic.
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The teams that do not want the related link to the topic about extended warranties can include a key definition in their DITA map that does not include an href attribute, for example:
<map> <!-- ... --> <keydef keys="extended-warranties"/> <!-- ... --> </map>
When processed, the related link in the topic is not rendered.
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Yet another team wants to simply have a paragraph about extended warranties printed. They define the key definition for "extended-warranties" as follows:
<map> <!-- ... --> <keydef keys="extended-warranties"/> <topicmeta> <linktext>This product does not offer extended warranties.</linktext> </topicmeta> <!-- ... --> </map>
When this team renders their content, there is no hyperlink in the output, just the text "This product does not offer extended warranties" statement.