Opening a DITA Map With Topic Content Resolved

It is possible to open a DITA map in the main editor with all the content from the referenced topics resolved and presented in one document. To do this, select the DITA map in the DITA Maps Manager view and click the Open Map in Editor with Resolved Topics toolbar button. This opens the DITA map in the main editor area with content from all topic references expanded in-place. Topic references to non-DITA resources (e.g. Markdown files), which are interpreted dynamically as DITA XML at publishing time, are also expanded and shown converted to DITA XML.

If the Display referenced content setting in the Author Preferences page is not selected, references to maps, topics, and content references can be expanded on demand by clicking the small Expand Reference expansion button located next to each element that contains a reference.

Content from the resolved topics that is referenced using a @conref or @conkeyref attribute is presented as read-only by default. To edit it, you must use the Edit Reference contextual menu action to open the source topic that contains the referenced content.

Editing Referenced Content Directly

If you want to edit the referenced content directly without having to open the source document, go to Options > Preferences > Editor > Edit Modes > Author and select the Allow referenced content to be edited option. The referenced content becomes editable in-place and saving the document will save all other modified topics.

Things to be Aware of When Enabling This Option:

The references become editable only if the referenced topics are the root elements. If, for example, in the DITA map, there are references directly to subtopics embedded in a larger topic, those references will not be editable.
If the content is stored in a CMS, you need to deselect the Local files only option to edit such remote referenced topics directly but this feature might not function properly with remote resources (it depends on the capabilities of the CMS connector).
Since a single topic may be referenced in multiple places in the DITA map, be careful not to make conflicting changes to that topic.
When modified topics are saved, the Only modified content option in the Options > Preferences > Editor > Edit Modes > Author > Serialization page is ignored.
The toolbar has two DITA map-specific actions for inserting topic references and all DITA topic-specific actions that can be used to make changes in the referenced DITA topics.
The content completion and schema-aware insertion strategies work in each referenced topic according to their respective schema.
The contextual menu presents the relevant actions in each referenced topic.
Validation works for each individual referenced topic but only if it contains modifications.