What is an aggregated topic?

You can use chunking to create an aggregated topic in HTML online help and Documentation Center outputs. With chunking, multiple smaller topics appear as a single aggregated topic. Aggregation is not useful in PDF outputs.

How is an aggregated topic made?

Aggregated topics are created by nesting topics under another topic and setting the chunking, linking, and toc attributes. The topic under which you nest other topics is the parent topic. The nested topics are child topics.

Why not combine the information in a single DITA topic?

The following are reasons for aggregating topics:

• You want a group of topics to appear together in context-sensitive help. For example, there might be a main topic that describes a feature or page, followed by the supporting task topics.

• You have concept topics that should appear as one unit in the output, but you want them to be separate topics due to their size or because you plan to use the smaller concept topics in different contexts.

• You have complex field description topics. The nature of the content requires the use of separate topics, but they need to appear together in the output.

• You are creating articles, which are published on the Avaya Documentation Center. An article focuses on a specific task or activity. For more information about creating articles, see GIS Documentation Standard for Articles.

Limitation of the chunk attribute

You can only apply chunking at one level in a topic hierarchy. If you apply chunking to a higher-level topic and to lower-level topics that have additional topic levels under them, Avaya Documentation Center and HTML outputs might fail.

If you require chunking at a lower level in Avaya Documentation Center and HTML outputs, you cannot aggregate the topics at a higher level. Instead, you can use a relationship table to link topics to the higher-level topic.