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ptc-30501501-Visitor
1-Visitor
January 27, 2010
Question

External Xrefs in Screen FOSI?

  • January 27, 2010
  • 2 replies
  • 771 views

I'm trying to get gentext in Editor to pop up Item Numbers that are xref'd in different documents.

PTC's FOSI manual says external xrefs are only supported in ACL, but I can't find any data about that in the ACL manuals.

Can someone help me get started here? I do have the filename (minus the ".xml") as an attribute in the xref if that helps.

<xref itemid="ExMRS00004-87" posttext=")" pretext="(" wpid="S00004-9-2355-319"/">

It would also be extremely helpful if I could throw a warning that the work package referenced (wpid) does not exist. With wpid's that complicated, I'm seeing lots of typos that don't get found until the work package is inserted into the full manual and the xrefs can be updated with real data...which is really a bit late as writers aren't allowed to do that themselves.

Thanks again!

John T. Jarrett
BAE Systems | Arbortext version 5.4 | LOGSA XSL-FO v 1.5

    2 replies

    E
    ebenton1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    January 27, 2010
    This sounds like the type of functionality that would be part of PTC/Arbortext's DLM feature, which I am not sure, but I believe is separately-licensed and separately-installed and separately-purchased.
    C
    ClayHelberg18-Opal
    18-Opal
    January 27, 2010
    Hi John-



    Ed's right, this is the sort of thing that DLM is designed to handle for
    you. Then again, DLM might be more than you need for this particular
    requirement.



    I think what they are referring to in the manual is the use of
    SYSTEM-FUNC in your FOSI to call ACL code that would fetch the relevant
    information from the referenced file. Conceptually, it would look
    something like this:



    * In your FOSI, the e-i-c for the <xref> element would include
    generated text that invokes a SYSTEM-FUNC variable, to call an ACL
    function

    * The ACL function would get the file reference information from
    the current oid, go out and load the target document, find the relevant
    title or number or whatever from that document, and return it as a
    string

    * The ACL function would also handle checking for the existence
    of the target; you could do this by popping up a warning message and
    returning an empty string, or by returning an error string that would
    appear in the document, or maybe both.



    If you search the help for system-func, you should find some topics that
    help you get started with using ACL functions in FOSI stylesheets. Once
    you figure out the basics of that, it opens up a whole new world of
    possibilities for formatting documents. (Of course, you have to be a
    little careful about that, because using ACL functions in FOSI
    stylesheets can have an impact on rendering performance.)



    --Clay


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