The Couchbase Documentation Repository for Couchbase 4+ DITA based Docs

A guide for contributing to the Couchbase Server Documentation can be found here.

All major content within the documentation should be annotated with ID tags to allow linking to specific sections of content within the documentation. These ID tags should match the title of the section, they must use alpha-numeric lower-case characters only and any spaces must be replaced with underscores.

Inclusion of code samples is an important aspect of our documentation. Code-samples within our documentation should be commited to the devguide-examples repository, and then the same code should be included within the documentation directly as a code block. These code-blocks should have a comment on the first line indicating the source of the code (in the format of a link to the specific file and lines on github). It is the responsibility of the person who changes a code sample to update all links to that code sample file. Note that the devguide-examples has a branch per major.minor version of the documentation starting with 4.5.

Code samples typically come in three flavors:

1. One-liners, for example

   cb.upsert(docid, {'key1': 'value1'})
   

   This kind of example hints at proper usage, but does not entirely reflect what the operation does. it is understood that the text surrounding the example provides sufficient explanation

2. Contextual, for example

   rv = cb.upsert(docid, {'key1': 'value1'}
   print rv
   # <OperationResult>...
   

   This kind of example might provide some additional information at how a specified API or operation works, and how it might be used in application code. The example is syntactically correct, but may not include all the required components for making it functional.

3. Standalone, for example

   from couchbase.bucket import Bucket
   cb = Bucket('couchbase://localhost/default')
   rv = cb.upsert(docid, {'key1': 'value1'}
   print rv
   # ...
   

   This is a fully functional, standalone example which can be executed by a user. This may contain a significant amount of boilerplate (such as imports and other initialization code) needed to make the example standalone.

Examples of the standalone kind will live inside the devguide-examples repository. These examples should be copied over to DITA where necessary, but should be modified to be contextual so as not to confuse the reader. A link to the standalone example should be placed near the contextual example, so that a user may be able to further execute and play with the code.

There are no strict rules for where to place examples and what type they should be.

One-liners do not need to be sourced in real code, and are more similar to pseudocode (but are syntactically correct for the language being used).

The content in the devguide-examples repository is versioned by server version (TODO: how to version by SDK version? or perhaps just version that inside the filename?).

Documentation authors (i.e. SDK maintainers) should ensure that in-dita links to the examples refer to the versioned branches, and that fixes in documentation are reflected in both standalone and contextual examples

Make sure all topics have a short description, as that is used not only to inform the reader about what is in this document, but it also goes in the meta description in the HTML. Google may use this as the snippet under a link in a search result. They recommend "a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph"

An anti-example:

This section bootstraps knowledge on completely asynchronous computations using the SDK."

Replaced with:

The Couchbase Java SDK has a complete asynchronous API based in part on RxJava. This section provides information on how the asynchronous API can be used, how it works with Java platform and RxJava features and the kinds of error handling you will need to consider in application development.

That may even be a little long, but this was for a long page. Note that it gets in keywords like Java and RxJava.

Docs are generated with DITA OT. Technically, we have a forked version of DITA OT. As of this writing, we know this exists but we don't quite know why it was forked and it was done without history. That's a todo for later.

Generating docs is done like this:

dita -f html5 -i cb-docs.ditamap -o ~/tmp/output/ -Deditlink.remote.ditamap.url=https://github.com/couchbase/docs-cb4/edit/master/content/cb-docs.ditamap