The DITA connector is one of the oldest and most used connectors of the Fluid Topics platform, and it has aged. It had become difficult to improve it with new features and it needed a complete overhaul.
First, we ported it to the new microservice-based connector architecture. This provides real advantages:
Execution of DITA-OT is more isolated to improve the security of the entire system,
It can scale to more instances executing in parallel for faster processing,
It’s compliant with our monitoring stack to spot any issues faster.
More importantly, it gave us a better foundation to add support to new features such as DITA chunks.
Ever wished to define the secondary Table of Contents by the content?
DITA chunk is used with two options: to-content or by-topic. We added support to chunk to-content for now. This option is used to merge topics together into a single piece of content. This can be useful for improving the reading experience as all the small pieces of content are merged into a more consistent topic.
When using the DITA attribute chunk to-content, the DITA connector will keep the sub-topics as section topics. These topics of a new kind can be grouped together in the Reader page using a new pagination option. A secondary Table of Contents will automatically appear with the hierarchy of sections.
Note: The new DITA connector is only available on Kubernetes environments such as our Cloud infrastructure. For our SaaS clients, switching from the old to the new connector is seamless: no loss of content nor need to reprocess. For on-premises customers, the old DITA connector will be maintained at its current functional scope.