Branch filtering: Multiple condition sets for a branch

Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Version 1.3 Part 2: Technical Content Edition

Document
Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Version 1.3 Part 2: Technical Content Edition
Version
1.3
Author
OASIS DITA Technical Committee

Using multiple ditavalref elements as the children of a map or map branch indicates that the map or map branch must be conditionally processed using the rules that are specified in the referenced DITAVAL documents.

When multiple ditavalref elements occur as children of the same element, the rules in the referenced DITAVAL documents are processed independently. This effectively requires a processor to maintain one copy of the branch for each ditavalref, so that each copy can be filtered using different conditions.

Note: In most cases, it is possible to create a valid, fully-resolved view of a map with branches copied to reflect the different ditavalref conditions. However, this might not be the case when multiple ditavalref elements occur as direct children of a root map. In this case, it is possible that the map could be filtered in a manner that results in two or more distinct versions of the title or metadata. How this is handled is processor dependent. For example, when a root map has three ditavalref elements as children of map, a conversion to EPUB could produce an EPUB with three versions of the content, or it could produce three distinct EPUB documents.

When a processor maintains multiple copies of a branch for different condition sets, it has to manage situations where a single resource with a single key name results in two distinct resources. Key names must be modified in order to allow references to a specific filtered copy of the resource; without renaming, key references could only be used to refer to a single filtered copy of the resource, chosen by the processor. See Branch filtering: Impact on resource and key names for details on how to manage resource names and key names.