In my last post (A Hook into Stellent), I described how my organization was able to create a hook into Stellent that allows an external script to be executed upon conversion of native documents to perform transformations to each converted document. I also described the problem my organization was having with Stellent’s conversion of Microsoft Word tables of contents. I will describe our current solution to the Word tables of contents (TOC) conversion problem. I’m providing this solution to provide a specific example of how we are able to hook into Stellent, but what I describe here may soon be replaced by an improved solution.

My organization uses Stellent Web Content Management for publishing content to the web. One issue that has eaten up quite a bit of our time is getting better control over the HTML that is produced by the system. The product that converts native documents (such as Microsoft Word documents) to HTML is called Stellent Dynamic Converter (DC). DC has the ability to use rules to manipulate the HTML document during conversion. We have version 7.5 of DC, which uses something called a GUI template to customize the conversion process. Unfortunately, GUI templates do not seem to be as full featured as the script templates that were available prior to version 6.

Until recently, we coped with the limitations of DC. One limitation that we deemed unacceptable was DC’s treatment of Microsoft Word’s Tables of Contents (TOC). Our expectation for the content management system (CMS) is to manage our native documents and to allow them to be displayed in the native application, printed to paper, and be displayed as web pages. The problem is that TOC is used differently in each of these cases. When a document is viewed using the native application or printed from it, the TOC is used to find a section by using the page number. When a document is viewed as a web page (or viewed using the native application), the TOC is used as a link to easily move to the referenced section.