Hello community,
I have a project which is turning out to be quite a challenage. I'm hoping someone might have an idea of a creative solution. I use Tech Comm Suite 4.
Here's the project. I have field guide which our company maintains in Fm. The content of the book is aligned with a set of specifications. Basically the specification provides guidance about what must be done and the objectives for a myriad of tasks. Our field guide says how those tasks are performed. Here's an example. The specification says that the drain on an air conditioner must be water-tight, with the objective being that the drain does not leak. Our field guide says how to properly install the drain to achieve that specified outcome. My customers that use our field guide are now required to prove and document alignment between the field guide procedures and the corresponding specification.
My first attempt was rather cumbersome and would not easy to maintain. I thought of a table with the field headings in column and the specifiation ID number in another other. In our field guide we use a tyical heirchy of Chapter/H1/H2/H3. To get all of the field guide headings I created an LOP. I converted that content into a table and added another column for the spec content. I didn't want book updates to replace this content with the updated LOP so I copied the table to a new document. Then I could add the specifications info to the appropriate places in the table. Very tedious.
Recently the organization that maintains these specifications published the entire set online and provided an API allowing GET requests to the database. For each request there are 6 possible request paramaters and 8 possible respons fields. I'm wondering if it's at all possible to use the API in a Fm marker to pull data with a GET request and insert it into the field guide. I don't know know what our publish format would need to be for this to work. PDF, something from RoboHelp? Maybe there's a better method that I'm not thinking of.
Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. If you need any more inforamation, or if I'm not completely clear on something just let me know.
Thanks,
Darrel