For an xref, Author mode shows href instead of keyref

[jorahood]

I'm making use of the DITA feature of xrefs that the href attribute can be used as a fallback link if the key in the keyref attribute cannot be resolved in order to handle permissions. My xrefs look like this:

<xref keyref="document" href="denied.dita"/>

I want Author to show the target of this xref as the topic pointed to by the "document" key, if that key is defined. If the key is not defined, I want Author to show the target as "denied.dita".

What seems to be happening is that Author always shows the href as the target of the link instead of the keyref even if the key is defined. This does not seem compatible with the DITA spec.

I think you could duplicate this error easily but I will provide sample documents if necessary.

Thank you,
Andy Orahood

[adrian]

Hello,

We have reproduced this, Author does indeed prefer the href from the xref instead of the keyref.

So, would you like to see the keyref("document") or the topic and id that the keyref is pointing to?

e.g. if you have the keydef:
<keydef href="mydoc.dita#id" keys="document"/>
would you like the Author to show you *mydoc.dita#id* or is *document*(the keyref) enough?

Regards,
Adrian

[jorahood]

I would hope to see the topic that is the target of the key, in the same way that it appears when there is no href attribute given.

Thank you,
Andy Orahood

[jorahood]

Will this be addressed in a future release?

[adrian]

Hi,

Yes, I've logged this to our issue tracking tool and included your comments. It will be analyzed and resolved in a future version.

Regards,
Adrian

[jorahood]

Thank you. Will you update this thread or will I just have to look through the changelogs?

Hi,

Yes, I've logged this to our issue tracking tool and included your comments. It will be analyzed and resolved in a future version.

Regards,
Adrian

[jorahood]

nothing to see here

[george]

Yes, when this issue will be solved we will update this forum entry. FWIW the internal issue number is EXM-21733.

Best Regards,
George

[Radu]

Hi Andy,

In Oxygen 13.1 which will be released in a couple of weeks if an element has both keyref and href, only the keyref will be presented (even if invalid). It is slightly better than the current behavior as the keyref is preferred for navigation according to the specs.
The behavior which you desire (presenting the keyref if the key is valid otherwise present the href) is quite hard to implement as the key might become valid after some modifications in the DITA Map and the edited topic would have to automatically reload and show the keyref instead of the href. But we'll see what we can do in a future version.

Regards,
Radu

[jorahood]

Thanks, I appreciate your responsiveness.