Example: Link modification or removal
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.
1. 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>
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
Parent topic