SPFE Documentation | Collections > SPFE Development > Topic sets

Topic sets

In SPFE, a content set consists of one of more topic sets. A topic set is a collection of topics, usually on a related subject. In a book-based environment, a topic set would be similar to a manual, in the sense that a paper-based documentation systems is made up of books or manuals. However, SPFE does not presume that a topic set constitutes a manual. It is simply a collection of related topics, and how the topics in the topic set are related to each other is up to the information architect.

A topic set may be made up of individual topics written by authors. It may also be made up of topics generated from external sources, or of a combination of written and generated sources. In the case of topic sets created from external sources, you can also merge written content with the extracted content to form complete topics. This is a common approach to creating a reference document.

A topic set is defined by a topic set configuration file using the configuration setting /topic-set. The topic set configuration specifies the topics t be included in the topic set. However, you should not think of this simply as a list of topics files to include. Instead, this of this as a query that returns a set of topics that meet a specific set of conditions. A topic may be added to a topic set simply by creating a topic that meets the conditions for inclusion in a particular topic set.

Because a topic set is simply a configuration of topics, you can have more than one topic-set configuration that includes the same or a similar set of topics. You can do this as a means of reusing topics, or simply to create different build variations.