Can users specify the location of the preferences file used by Oxygen XML Author?

[Graham Hannington]

I have read the Oxygen documentation topic "Preferences" , including the text following the heading "Preferences Directory Location".

I use Oxygen XML Author to develop documentation in DITA for two product brands.

One brand requires me to install add-ons that introduce new, custom document types; for example, based on the DITA map type.

I have always used separate installations of Oxygen to work on each brand. Until now, I thought that this made me "safe" from differences between those two brand authoring environments, such as differences in DTDs.

I was wrong.

I've discovered this because, for the first time in my experience, I am now using the same version of Oxygen (22.1) for both brands. Historically, for reasons I won't go into here, the Oxygen version for one of the brands was backlevel.

The result is that the two installations of Oxygen both refer to the same version-specific preferences file:

"C:\Users\[my user name]\AppData\Roaming\com.oxygenxml.author\oxyAuthorOptionsSa22.1.xml"

If I attempt to open in Oxygen a .ditamap for the brand that doesn't require the custom document types, Oxygen reports the error:

A '(' character or an element type is required in the declaration of element type "map".

I have some inkling of why this happens, but I haven't yet taken the time to investigate this in detail.

But I do know that, if I go to Oxygen Preferences > Document Type Association, and deselect the "Enabled" checkboxes for those two document types, then Oxygen opens such .ditamap files without any error.

I don't want to have to keep enabling/disabling these when I switch between brands.

Could the custom document types introduced by the add-ons be tweaked to avoid this issue? Perhaps. I don't know. I plan to look into that.

A specific question for this forum: can users point different Oxygen installations, at the same version level, to different preferences files? If so, how? Or is this relationship "hardcoded"; not user-configurable?

[alex_jitianu]

Hello,

Yes, you can setup one of the Oxygen installations to use a different preferences directory through the com.oxygenxml.customOptionsDir system property:

Code: Select all

-Dcom.oxygenxml.customOptionsDir=absolute_file_path

If you have space in the file path, use quotes:

Code: Select all

-Dcom.oxygenxml.customOptionsDir="absolute_file_path"

You can add this inside the *.vmoptions file and all the application launchers (like oxygen.exe) will pick it up. You can also put it inside command line launchers (like oxygen.bat), if you prefer using those.

Best regards,
Alex