Understanding the working environment

The IXIASOFT CCMS working environment is an customized Eclipse perspective.

An Eclipse perspective is a collection of tabbed panes referred to as views and an editor area. The views let you perform specific operations on specific sets of content resources. Editors give you direct access to the text of your XML files.

The perspective used as the IXIASOFT CCMS working environment is the DITA perspective. It contains the default views needed to work with IXIASOFT CCMS.

Figure: The DITA Perspective


Overview of the DITA perspective

About the editor area

By default, the center of the DITA Perspective is used for the editor area. When you open XML files for editing, this is where they appear. You may also be able to have several different files open in different editors at the same time in the editor area, if your workstation is set up for this.

Other editors that are supplied with IXIASOFT CCMS include:
  • DITA Map Editor - displays an outline view of the document deliverable similar to the DITA Map view, but without the tag editing features. You can have several DITA Map Editors open in the pane where your XML editors appear.
  • Read-only Editor - displays the selected topic's text and XML tags in read-only mode. This lets you look at a topic without the risk of inadvertent modifications.

About the views

Some views, such as the DITA Map view, show the document deliverable's overall structure. Others allow you to preview the topic you're working on, or view its properties.

For example, the following are a few of the commonly used views:

  • Search Results - displays the documents that match your search criteria.
  • Documents - gives you several document-specific tracking functionalities, such as identifying recently used documents, or frequently used documents. This view is described later in this chapter.
  • Search - lets you specify the documents types and the cycles in which you want to search.
  • DITA Map - displays an outline view of the document deliverable corresponding to the table of contents and offers a set of tag editing features. Only one map can be open at a time in this view.
  • Todo List - displays files that are assigned to the current user, along with their current status and position on the user's timeline.
  • Dependencies view – lets you see the documents that a given document references and that it, in turn, refers to. This gives you a quick way, for example, to see the maps that a specific topic is in; or the topics that reference a given image.
  • Ditaval view – lets you save the sets of output parameters that you use most frequently, and then apply them as you generate the various types of output.