collection.md

id	author	publisher
collection	Larry Kollar	Oje Media

Using Collections

If you are using DITA maps to structure your book, collections are easier than reltables for specifying relationships. On the other hand, collections are effective only between parent and child topics.

To set up a collection, add the collection-type attribute to a topicref item in your bookmap. The attribute can have one of the following values:

• unordered—Links between a topic and its children, not between children.
• family—Links between all child topics in the collection.
• sequence—Links between a topic and its children, and between adjacent children.
• choice—Used when a reader needs only one of a set of child topics (for example, replacing a battery in one of a group of products). DITA-OT renders links for choice in the same manner as for unordered.

If you only want, for example, links from the parent to child topics in unordered or family collections (but not vice versa), add the attribute linking="sourceonly" to the topicref.