The Authoring App in Action

The MarkLogic Sample Authoring App for PowerPoint lets authors enrich PowerPoint presentations using Tags, associate and manage metadata with those tags, as well as search and reuse existing tagged components and their metadata in new presentations.

The MarkLogic Sample Authoring App is built using the MarkLogic Toolkit for PowerPoint. Please install the Add-in and supporting XQuery library from the Toolkit to use this application. The Toolkit provides a guide for installation and comes with its own Sample Application. You can follow the guide instructions for installing this Sample App as well.

Getting Started

To get started using this Sample Application, you'll need to update 3 areas with the URL of your application. See the README, as well as the Sample Authoring App Developer's Guide, both included in the download for the application.

Following is an overview of the Sample Authoring App functionality. A developer's guide is included in the release so you can configure this application to meet your requirements. A 'files of interest' section is also included in the guide in case you just want to get in there and start hacking.

Enrich

On this tab you'll find the tags palette. In PowerPoint you can tag presentations, slides, and slide components (shapes within a slide). For the initial release of the Sample App, the components you can tag and roundtrip from MarkLogic include presentations, slides, textboxes, and images. You can select what you'd like to tag from the navigation bar located on the tags tab. Below the presentation is currently selected.

 

You can enrich the presentation by just selecting presentation in the navigator bar of the tags tab and clicking a button on the tags palette to apply the tag. To enrich a slide, you would select the slide you'd like to tag in PowerPoint, select slides in the navigator bar of the tags tab, and click the button in the tags palette to apply the tag.

 

 

A list of tags that have been applied to the selected presentation, slide, or slide component, are listed in the Properties panel below the tags palette. To the left of the tag name, is a delete button that you can click to remove the tag from your selection.

You may notice that the tag labels for presentations and slides in the above screen shots differ. These tags are configurable. The tag labels and the amount of you tags you make available for enrichment of presentations, slides, and slide components is determined by the configuration. See the developer's guide for more detail.

The configuration is a simple XML file and it generates the HTML for the buttons on your palette as well as the associated JavaScript functions required for inserting the tags. The names you use for enrichment will be the values you use for Search once you've saved your document to MarkLogic Server.

By clicking on a slide or slide component within an active presentation, the Properties section beneath the tags palette helps to navigate the tags by updating automatically and providing information about the tags you have currently applied to the object selected. You'll see:

• the name of the tag
• a delete button to remove the tag
• if the tag belongs to a slide component (shape), you'll also see a save all button

 

You only need to click save for a tagged slide component in the event you have tagged a component and then change the text within it. This is required so we can successfully roundtrip the component from MarkLogic to a new presentation once you've saved the presentation to MarkLogic Server. We hope to improve this in a future release, but for now, if the content in a tagged component changes, you'll need to explicitly save it to retain the roundtrip capabilities.

Tags are only exposed through PowerPoint's object model. There is no native functionality in the application for applying or displaying tags. We've done our best to provide all the visual cues you'll need to navigate tags within the Authoring pane. By selecting slides and components, tags and messages will be displayed in the Properties panel to inform you what's been tagged and what hasn't.

Metadata

Each time you add a tag to your presentation, a custom XML metadata part is added to the .pptx being authored. This custom metadata part is associated by id with the tag you've added. On this tab you can edit the metadata values for associated tags.

The metadata pane provides a list of the tags applied to your presentations, slides, and slide components. By clicking on a label in the list, the form for associated metadata will be displayed beneath the list view. Edit values, and as you change fields, the values will be automatically saved to the metadata form.

 

You'll see that for this Sample, there are 3 types of metadata forms associated with the tags. We are also using Dublin Core metadata. This again, is configurable. You can use other XML for your metadata, and can even have a different custom XML metadata form for each tag you define in the tag palette. Please refer to the developer's guide included with the Sample Authoring App.

If you delete a tag from the document (using the delete button on the Properties panel of the enrich tab), the tag's associated metadata part is also removed from the .pptx.

Search

When you save a .pptx to MarkLogic Server, it is automatically unzipped and made available for search and re-use. On this pane, you can search for text found within any slides saved in MarkLogic.

Under the search box, you'll find you can select Components, Slides, or Presentations. This selection will filter the types of results returned, which also have different options available for re-use.

 

The results provide a count of search results as well as pagination.

When you search and have selected Presentations, all presentations that contain a slide that includes the search text value will be returned.

When you search and have Slides, any slide from any presentation including the search text value will be returned.

When you search and have selected Components, any component from any slide, from any presentation including the search text value will be returned.

For each result, we see:

• the document title (if present in the extracted document properties part) or the URI of the source document in MarkLogic
• the last modified date and last modified by for the source document
• an icon informing which type component we are inserting (either slide, textbox, or image)
• a snippet of text, with our search text in bold
• rollover of a snippet will display more text for the result
• a thumbnail image of the slide (representing the Slide or Slide containing Components)
• an insert button (Components, Slides)
• an undo button (Components, Slides)

The thumbnail image for Presentations results will be of the first slide in the deck.

You won't have the options of 'undo' and 'insert' for Presentation search results. Those are only provided when searching for Components and Slides.

Clicking the document title will open the source presentation from MarkLogic Server.

Clicking insert will insert the slide into the active presentation at the current slide position. The search result may have tags with associated metadata parts. The slide may also include components that have been tagged and also include associated custom metadata parts. If any of the search results has tags and associated metadata parts in their source document in MarkLogic, those tags and metadata parts are retained and added to the presentation being authored. You can view and edit any metadata values by examining them in the metadata tab.

In the case that you've inserted something you didn't intend to, you can click 'undo', and the inserted Slide or Component will be removed as well as any associated custom metadata parts from the active .pptx package.

Finally, you can restrict searches through use of the filter tab. Click the drop down arrow to see a list of tag labels you can select to apply to your search. This list is also configurable. To apply the criteria, click the filter button. You can close the filter selection and keep your filter applied.

 

A note on slide images

You may be asking: Where did the thumbnails for slide images come from? Well, in our first version of the MarkLogic Toolkit for PowerPoint, we provided the ability to 'Save To MarkLogic' directly from the button in Office 2007 (You'll now find the same option available from 'Add-ins' in the backstage view for Office 2010). When we save to MarkLogic, we also save the deck's slide images, so we have them available for display in search results.

For Components, we reuse the slide images and provide cues through icons, snippets, and component labels to help guide authors in finding and inserting the content they seek to re-use in new presentations.

Conclusion

The Sample Authoring App is intended as a way to provide authors a way to enrich content in PowerPoint, as well as define and identify PowerPoint presentations, slides, and slide components for search, re-use, auditing, and tracking.

By providing a way for authors to re-use components of content across documents, identified by rich metadata, authors can then use MarkLogic to query where document components are being re-used. Also, if some document component includes text that needs to be updated across documents, the metadata can be used to run an update of components across all PowerPoint presentations in MarkLogic that include those sections.