Creating compund documents

[Derek Hohls <dh...@csir.co.za>]

I am looking for some help/suggestions with creating compound
documents using Cocoon.

By 'compound', I mean a document whose parts are generated in
different ways, but are brought together to create a single
whole.  The current practice/approach in the design of Cocoon
seems to be aggregation, which essentially means having a 
different entry for each part of a 'page' - this is a model
that works well when you have many pages all being generated
in the same kind of way - eg a complex page layout with header,
footer, sidebar, main content and so on.  The downside seems
to be that you essentially have a fixed configuration in the
sitemap; any change to *what* goes into the compound document
neccesitates a change in the sitemap.

In my case, the situation is complicated by the fact that many
of the parts o the document are generated in similar ways, but
with differences caused by different parameters.  Ideally, I
would like to be able to create a 'configuration' file, which
has pointers to all the elements of the final document; this 
file could then be easily changed to accomodate chnages in the
way that the document needs to be appear (a very likely 
scenario in this case).  So, for example:

<file-set>
  <generate-file name="joe?param=1" />
  <generate-file name="james" />
  <generate-file name="joe?param=2" />
  <generate-file name="john" />
</file-set>

could be called; each <generate-file> element would essentially
be a call met by a matching entry in the site map and result
in a document fragment slotting into that position in the 
compound document.  The final file would then be processed in a
final transformation step.

Is such a scenario possible?  If so, I would be grateful if 
someone could explain it to me...

Thanks
Derek

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Re: Creating compund documents

[Steven Noels <st...@outerthought.org>]

Derek Hohls wrote:

> Is such a scenario possible?  If so, I would be grateful if 
> someone could explain it to me...

Have a look at the cinclude transformer: 
http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/userdocs/transformers/cinclude-transformer.html

</Steven>
-- 
Steven Noels                            http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center
Read my weblog at              http://radio.weblogs.com/0103539/
stevenn at outerthought.org                stevenn at apache.org


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