Package com.deltaxml.dita

package com.deltaxml.dita
DeltaNova DITA Compare API.

The public classes within this package provide the DeltaXML DITA Compare product's API (Application Programming Interface). It is recommended that you start with one of the, DitaTopicCompare, DitaMapfileCompare and DitaMapTopicsetCompare classes, which enable DITA documents, individual topics, individual maps and map-aligned topic-sets to be compared respectively.

The DitaMapTopicsetCompare class provides a file based comparison of the topics within two maps. Here, the topics within the input maps are aligned for a pairwise topic level comparison. And the results of this comparison are then presented in a map, using one of three available 'map result structures': topic-set, map-pair, and unified-map, as set by the setMapResultStructure method.

Correctly aligning the topics when performing a map driven topic comparison is, in general, a difficult problem. However, there are some common sub-classes of this problem that are more tractable. For example, consider the context where a DITA document (and all of its source) are kept within a directory tree on the file system and document versioning is done by copying this directory. In this context the two DITA documents can be compared by gathering the relative paths from the top-level maps to each of the referenced DITA-topics, and comparing those topics that have the same relative paths. This is the default approach taken by the map comparator.

When using the default topic alignment approach it is possible to identify both the insertion of new topics and the deletion of old topics. However, it is not possible to handle topics whose relative location has changed. Therefore, a future version of this interface will provide a means of supplying a custom topic alignment algorithm.