Oxygen XML Forum

Hi,

Just wanted to know if it is possible at all to create related links to sections. So far, I've read that you only create related links to topics, and nothing else.

Thanks,
Christina

Hi Christina,

Functionally speaking with Oxygen you can also add related links to any element defined inside a topic (as long as it has an @id attribute defined on it). The publishing also works.

The DITA specification does not state very clearly if related links must point only to a topic. Maybe you can also register and ask around on the DITA Users List (Yahoo Group). The DITA specification developers are all registered there so they may have another opinion on this.

Regards,
Radu

Hi Radu,

Thanks for clearing this up. However, after trying several things I ran into the following, and I don't know if that's a bug or just not possible:

We're using a lot of shared topics in our documentation. This means that we're also using the copy-to attribute whenever it is necessary to use a shared topic in two different locations, i. e. wherever this shared topic is needed, we insert the topicref to that shared topic and add a copy-to attribute with a different path. This works fine for us as long as we don't need to refer to that shared topic in a related link list.
In this case, only the link text is inserted, but no link or page number. This is independent of whether we refer to the topic title or a section within that topic.
Could it be that we don't use the copy-to attribute correctly? From a logical point of view I could imagine that this is the logical result of the copy effect that this attribute has. You insert a completely different link that has nothing to do with the original location. Therefore, the related link cannot be created, because this topic is not really referenced anywhere anymore.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,
Christina

Hi Christina,

The processing of the "copy-to" attribute has always had various small problems when publishing using the DITA Open Toolkit.
If you send us (support@oxygenxml.com) a small DITA project exemplifying the problem we could try to look into this and tell you more about the problem.

Regards,
Radu