Hi Jonathan

I don't know of a way to do what you want to do without having Maven pre-process your XML.  Mobicents [1] have been experimenting with Maven pre-processing.  You may want to reach out to them about their successes with this approach.

We don't recommend using conditional formatting in your documentation, because it tends to cause problems with translation and can complicate your build process.

For a more succinct explanation, I would strongly recommend that you read the section on conditional formatting in the Publican User Guide [2].

[1] www.mobicents.org

[2] http://jfearn.fedorapeople.org/Publican/chap-Users_Guide-Creating_a_document.html#sect-Users_Guide-Conditional_tagging

The conditional inclusion of elements in docbook is called profiling, http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Profiling.html

The major differences:

Publican:

• only supports the condition profile attribute as referred to in the publican user guide.
• honors the condition attribute in <xi:include> (arguably not valid)
• will report an empty .xml file as invalid so if a file only has  <chapter condition="blah"> and condition is not set to blah it will not build.  You need to put the condition attribute in the <xi:include>

jDocbook:

• supports all the profiling attributes, but only one per build.
• does not honor profiling attributes in <xi:include>
• doesn't choke on empty .xml files (arguable a bug)

For compatibility between the two you might want something like:

<book>
     <xi:include href="chapt-about.xml" /> <!-- a chapter -->
     <chapter condition="developer">
          <title>Developer Introduction </title>
          <xi:include href="chapt-content-developer_intro.xml" />
 
     </chapter>
     <chapter condition ="administrator">
          <title>Administrator Introduction</title>
          <xi:include href="chapt-content-admin_intro.xml" />
 
     </chapter>
</book>

Setting up profiling in jDocbook ( I'm not aware of this being documented anywhere yet apart from MPJDOCBOOK-40 )

You need to set the profiling attribute and value for it in the POM

<configuration> 
     <profiling> 
          <enabled>true</enabled> 
          <attributeName>condition</attributeName> 
          <attributeValue>developer</attributeValue> 
     </profiling> 
</configuration> 

To pass in different values for different builds you would probably want to put this configuration in different profiles in the POM

<profiles>
    
    <profile>
        <id>dev_guide</id>
        <build>
            <plugins>
                <plugin>
                    <groupId>org.jboss.maven.plugins</groupId>
                    <artifactId>maven-jdocbook-plugin</artifactId>
                    <version>2.2.0</version>
                    <extensions>true</extensions>
                    <configuration> 
                        <profiling> 
                            <enabled>true</enabled> 
                            <attributeName>condition</attributeName> 
                            <attributeValue>developer</attributeValue> 
                        </profiling> 
                    </configuration> 
                </plugin>
            </plugins>
        </build>
    </profile>

    <profile>
        <id>admin_guide</id>
        <build>
            <plugins>
                <plugin>
                    <groupId>org.jboss.maven.plugins</groupId>
                    <artifactId>maven-jdocbook-plugin</artifactId>
                    <version>2.2.0</version>
                    <extensions>true</extensions>
                    <configuration> 
                        <profiling> 
                            <enabled>true</enabled> 
                            <attributeName>condition</attributeName> 
                            <attributeValue>administrator</attributeValue> 
                        </profiling> 
                    </configuration> 
                </plugin>
            </plugins>
        </build>
    </profile>
    
</profiles>