Enhancing the release notes

Note:

You do not necessarily need to use the provided release notes in that section, but you can initialize your own, so that you do not lose time.

Now that you have a deeper understanding of the release notes are structured, it's time to build a more elaborate one.

With the template

For that, copy the doc/XRN-Template-enhanced.xml file under the usual location where you have already been working from the start of the guide. Opne this file in your smart XML editor in order to overview how we have already enhanced it regarding its previous basic state. Not all the XRN features are being used, but it is more elaborate.

What we want is render it, no? Re-use the previously open console. Run the enhanced target.

Open the generated HTML page. What do you see there? Yes, there are two releases described and much more details. You don't like the colors and the style? Wait until we explain how to customize all this...

With your own component

Now that you have understood the main guide lines of the XRN framework and that you have your own component in mind - we call it X to make things shorter - it's time to use the xRN in order to describe your component release notes.

In any case, it is advised to copy of the two XRN template files (the one you feel more confident with, depending on your understanding so far), rename the file as X-XRN.xml (with the same previous convention). This is your own release notes XML file we are going to work on. Before going any further, do not forget to customize at least the identifier (@ID top attribute), so that it is properly rendered and can be properly referenced by other release notes.

From now, you are able to invoke the releaseNotesX Ant target of the same previous buildfile. You can view the result of the HTML-rendered page.

If you already have some release notes for your X component under a textual format, you'll need to start by copying this information and structure it according to the XRN framework information structure into your own release notes file. First create the Release individual release of your component in the past, then create roughly one Feature per change description. This is a task you will need to perform if you intend to use the XRN framework, otherwise you will not benefit of this past information in the XRN world. Too bad, since one the purpose of this little framework is to enable to keep track of what has been released!

Review

So far, we've focused on the release notes file. Its structured has been detailed, it has been explained that you need to create your own and initialize properly. This means that now, almost all the valuable and necessary information about component X has been entered into the framework.

We've seen that there is an Ant task of the framework that handles the rendering of the release notes into the HTML format. We haven't discussed much about it, though this is an important feature of the framework. We now need to focus on that.

Important:

You have certainly noticed that the way the release notes were described is not something which is not tied to any language other than XML. This means that this information can be used by any system that understand XML: needless to explain why this was highly required...