TOC displays ellipses with a broken link in WebHelp

[crothwell15]

I am reaching out regarding an issue one of our writing teams has encountered with one of their recent publications. Specifically, the Table of Contents is displaying ellipses instead of the "Notices" topic, accompanied by a broken link in the WebHelp.

TOC showing ellipses.png

Your_file_couldn_t_be_accessed_message.png

Our format is to have the "Notices" topic listed in the backmatter with the "Acknowledgements" subtopic.
Additionally, the publication includes 14 extensive relationship tables that have been incorporated as 14 separate submaps.
To address these issues, I have found each of the the following workarounds resolved the issue:
• Moving the "Notices" topic out of the backmatter and re-adding it as a chapter with the Acknowledgements as a subtopic, which is our current solution.
• Removing all relationship tables. Although this fixes the issue, it is not a viable solution because the relationship tables are required.
• Providing a single shortened relationship table fixed the issue; however, when I re-added all entries for that relationship table, the issue reoccurred.
Given these attempts, I am seeking your expertise to identify any additional steps or solutions I might consider so that the Notices topic and its Acknowledgements subtopic can appear in the backmatter. Your guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance for your assistance. I look forward to your valuable input.

[Costin]

Hi crothwell15,

This behavior mostly occurs when the main DITA Map you are using refers resources that are located outside of the folder containing the .ditamap file, or in a subfolder of it.

The recommended solution for this is to run a validation on you DITA Map first, by opening the main DITA Map in the DITA Maps Manager view and running the "Validate and check for completeness" action. Make sure that the option "Report references to resources outside of the DITA map folder" is enabled and run the validation to identify any such occurrences.
After you identified the resources, the suggested approach to resolve this is the 1st method listed in the References Outside the Main DITA Map Folder topic from our online User-Guide.
Basically, you could either make sure that all resources are located in the same folder with the main DITA Map, or in one of its subfolders, or create a DITA Map in a location that is above any of the resources and maps, then refer the other DITA Maps from the main Map.
If you are using a GUI-based software, like Oxygen XML Editor or Oxygen XML Author, there is also a dedicated transformation parameter which could be set in your transformation scenario configuration (fix.external.refs.com.oxygenxml), also mentioned in the topic I referred to above in my reply.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Costin