Content Reference Warning

[sanGeoff]

Hi, we are in the process of switching to oXygen.
When running the oXygen validation on our DITA files I get about 180 of the following warnings:

Code: Select all

Engine name: oXygen

Severity: warning

Description: Element is not a content reference but has attribute "cols" with value "-dita-use-conref-target".

The code that causes theses warnings look like this:

Code: Select all

<table conref="file2.xml#ref_1/table_SubSource"> 

	<tgroup cols="-dita-use-conref-target"> 

	 <tbody> 

		<row> 

		  <entry></entry> 

		  <entry></entry> 

		</row> 

	 </tbody> 

	</tgroup> 

</table>

Is this an actual warning that needs to be addressed, or can it be ignored?
When I do an insert conref in oXygen I get a cols attribute something like cols="cols_qkk_jgv_mq"

[sorin_ristache]

Hi,

You can ignore this warning. An attribute cols="-dita-use-conref-target" is necessary on the tgroup element in this case because tgroup is a required child element of table (required by the DITA DTD schema) and cols is a required attribute of tgroup. This attribute simply assigns to the cols attribute the same value that the cols attribute has in the original conref'ed table element (the table element with the table_SubSource id attribute) without explicitly specifying that original cols value from the table_SubSource element.

We will try to find a way of detecting and suppressing this type of warning when a DITA topic or a DITA map is validated in the Oxygen application.

[sanGeoff]

Thanks for the quick reply. I will go ahead and ignore the warnings. I also added a ValidationProblemsFilter that filters the message out for individual document validation.

It looks like there is is not much processing in the toolkit with the cols attribute. Maybe it's just as easy to change all the -dita-use-conref-target cols attributes to cols="conref" or something instead. I don't think it would change anything.

[sorin_ristache]

The cols attribute is used for PDF output but other uses of this attribute could be added in the DITA-OT toolkit in the future.

Anyway a ValidationProblemsFilter is a nice way of filtering this warning message from the Oxygen view.