Example: Link modification or removal

This scenario outlines how different authors can effectively remove or modify a <link> element in a shared topic.

A company wants to use a shared topic for information about customer support. For most products, the shared topic should include a link to a topic about extended warranties. But a small number of products do not offer extended warranties.

1. Team one creates the shared topic: customer-support.dita. The topic contains the following mark-up:

    <related-links>
     <link keyref="extended-warranties" href="common/extended-warranties.dita"/>
    </related-links>

2. The teams that need the link to the topic about extended warranties can reference the customer-support.dita topic in their DITA maps. When processed, the related link in the topic resolves to the common/extended-warranties.dita topic.

3. The teams that do not want the related link to the topic about extended warranties can include a key definition in their DITA map that does not include an @href attribute, for example:

   <map>
     <!-- ... -->
     <keydef keys="extended-warranties"/>
     <!-- ... -->
   </map>

   When processed, the related link in the topic is not rendered.

4. Yet another team wants to simply have a paragraph about extended warranties printed. They define the key definition for "extended-warranties" as follows:

   <map>
     <!-- ... -->
     <keydef keys="extended-warranties"/>
       <topicmeta>
         <linktext>This product does not offer extended warranties.</linktext>
       </topicmeta>
     <!-- ... -->
   </map>

   When this team renders their content, there is no hyperlink in the output, just the text "This product does not offer extended warranties" statement.