Re-using outside content increases transformation time

[mstockman]

We're generating a set of PDFs in project A, and just recently decided to re-use a topic from project B (up-and-over into another directory). Project B contains thousands of topics.

Our transformation time for a PDF in project A went from 1 minute to 10 minutes. The log shows that the DITA-OT is, for some reason, processing every file in project B, which appears to explain the increase in time. But the topic we're re-using doesn't contain any links to the other topics in project B.

Can anybody help me to understand why the OT is touching every file project B, and (hopefully) provide an argument we can set to avoid this?

Thanks,
Mike

[Radu]

Hi Mike,

Probably that reused "topicB.dita" from the other project is not self contained, it contains links or conrefs to other topics in the other project and these topics contain links to other topics and so on. So indeed the publishing engine will go explore all links and conrefs and process all those indirectly referenced resources.
Version 3.2 of the DITA Open Toolkit publishing engine added a parameter to avoid doing such kind of indirect topic processing, probably the next Oxygen version (version 21 - February 2019) will include DITA OT 3.2.
In the meantime you need to make sure the reused topic does not have links to other topics, or if it has links, they are done using keyrefs so that you can re-define the keys in the first DITA project.

Regards,
Radu