Rules and conditional publishing
In ElePub rule based publishing and
conditional publishing are separate complementary features -
once more opposed to conventional database publishing. Although
both features provide something quite similar, they do this
in a very different way. Rule
based formatting
ElePub objects are rule based. Every
object can contain virtually any needed rule. Pages are built
from such objects. Therefore, the format used for publishing
can depend on such rules, which are either determined when
a page is generated or, in electronic applications, much later
in usage time when a page is presented.
This is especially useful when creating
publications for EleCat, the CDF based (Catalog Data Format)
electronic product catalog, which can interpret the rules
inherent to ElePub objects and therefore format the particular
layout as the rules say, i.e. situation dependent.
Conditional publishing
Of course, the powerful feature of exchanging contents on
page (as explained here)
can also be used to completely hide certain data from a page
and to show it only under certain conditions. This is what
in ElePub is called conditional publishing, another Elepub
feature unknown to conventional database publishing where
this can only be achieved with great complications.
This ElePub feature enables many new opportunities
like using the basically same layout for several output results
and/or to better utilize one layout for different media each
using the media's best capabilities. Some examples are:
- publish a paper version of a product catalog without
prices
- publish the same catalog to electronic paper with prices
included
- include references to a database or to a web server in
layout for electronic use,
- while the same layout is used for paper output with disabled
references
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