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Adding CALS-table related functionality to your custom Oxygen framework

Read time: 6 minute(s)

Oxygen comes with full support for CALS tables in DITA and Docbook documents, meaning that you can easily make selections, resize columns, and invoke special actions like insert or delete rows and columns, join, or split cells. You can also easily customize tables properties such as alignments, separators, and table borders. But what if you are editing documents from other vocabularies, containing tables with CALS structure? What you can do to obtain the same table editing features?

One option is to use a plugin that adds CALS table editing support along with specific table related actions: https://github.com/oxygenxml/web-author-sample-plugins/tree/master/web-author-CALS-table-plugin.

Another option is to customize your framework configuration:

Let's suppose that you already created an Oxygen framework for your documents vocabulary (if you need further information about frameworks, see The Oxygen SDK (Part 2: Frameworks)). What we want to obtain next is to extract all the CALS tables related support from Docbook framework and add it to your custom framework. Why Docbook and not DITA as reference? Because the DITA customization is based on the "class" attribute checking while the Docbook one is more general (element-name oriented).

If all goes well, your custom framework which uses the standard CALS table naming mechanism will properly handle tables, both for display and for table-related operations.