Validation errors

[writedoc]

I have created a DITA 1.2 bookmap with links to DITA concept, task, and reference topics. When I run a validation check I get a number of errors that indicate that files are not present; however, when I open the file referenced in the error message, the reported missing file is present! What's going on, is this a known problem with Oxygen 13.2 validation? Sample error message:

Code: Select all

System ID: D:\My Documents\WIP\dita_projects\ePublisher\RCS_Implementation_Guide_ePublisher\reference\abstract.dita

Engine name: oXygen

Severity: error

Description: Reference "file:/D:/My%20Documents/WIP/dita_projects/ePublisher/overview/intro.dita" does not exist.

Type: Reference

Start location: 64:6

End location: 65:21

[Radu]

Hi,

That's strange.

So you are saying that this file:

D:/My Documents/WIP/dita_projects/ePublisher/overview/intro.dita

exists on disk but Oxygen reports it as non existing.

We have not received any previous feedback about such an issue.
Could you make up a small DITA Map Project and send us some samples to support@oxygenxml.com?

Could you also copy your DITA Map project to another location and try from there?

Regards,
Radu

[writedoc]

Validation errors that indicate missing files is only occurring at the map level. Validation on individual files is OK. As requested, send samples via email.

[Radu]

Hi Malcolm,

Thanks for the samples.

I found the problem, there are many places in your DITA Project in which the references to topics use the Windows-syntax path separator like:

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 <topicref href="topics\LogsAlarmsIntro.dita"...

The DITA 1.2 specification:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/os ... ibute.html

States that:

Note that the path separator character in an URI is always the forward slash ("/"); the backward slash character ("\") is not permitted unescaped within URIs.

So you should search (using the Oxygen Find/Replace in Files for example) in all your topics for \ and where it is used to reference between DITA resources, replace it with / like:

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<topicref href="topics/LogsAlarmsIntro.dita".

But Oxygen should have definitely reported a proper and clear error message in such situation so we'll try to fix this issue on our side as well.

The benefit of this approach will also be the fact that your DITA Map will be valid also on Linux and Mac.

Regards,
Radu

[writedoc]

Thank you for your prompt response. That fixed the problem. All the map files now validate successfully.