Same file referred from multiple maps

[syed]

Hello,

There is a case where a single dita file is referred from multiple maps. The dita file is at one location. When the webhelp responsive transform is run, it creates HTML file for all the occurrences of in the maps. For example, if a fileA.dita is in a 'topics' folder and called from mapA.ditamap and mapB.ditamap and both the maps are in the same folder outside of the topics folder, the output would contain a 'topics' folder with fileA.html and fileA_2.html.

Is this typical for the webhelp transform? If yes, why? I don't see this behavior in HTML5 transform.

Thanks...
Syed

[Costin]

Hi,

We chose to generate duplicate HTML files, because each instance of the topic file should have it's own correct navigation links in the output (more specific, the links from the publication TOC, topic breadcrumb and menu).
To differentiate them in the publication, we enforce this through the "force-unique" parameter, which is, be default, set to "true" in the WebHelp Responsive transformation scenario.

You could easily notice that, in case the same topic is referred from different topics in the DITA Map (has different parents), if the "force-unique" parameter is not set, or is set to "false", the topic would have duplicate parent links in the topic TOC.

Regards,
Costin