What does Enhanced Completeness Check actually check ... and how do I turn it off?

[tony.morales_ap]

I believe that Arbortext's Enhanced Completeness Check for DITA documents is causing me an unfair amount of pain. First, here's all the on-line Help has to say about Enhanced Completeness Check, followed by my problems:



"Enhanced completeness checking checks for things that are described in the DITA standard, but cannot be validated against the DTD or XML schema. For example, enhanced completeness checking checks for missing files, incorrect or unusual URL formats, unusual format and type attribute values, the use of deprecated elements or attributes, and so forth."



The following experiments are with Arbortext 5.4M060.

* If I have a bunch of topics with xref elements whose href attributes point to external Web pages (format = "html" and scope = "external"), I frequently get the following error:

External/Peer reference does not exist

This often happens if I'm behind a firewall without proxy settings configured to access the Internet. Is Arbortext trying to go out to the Internet to determine whether the URI is valid? If so, then can this be turned off? For which URIs does it do this? Does it examine the URI scheme or does it blindly do this for all URIs? This behavior is not documented.

* Again, we have a bunch of topics with xref elements, but this time we have some URIs with "unusual" URI schemes. We post-process such URIs in the HTML. For example:

<xref href="window:a123456" format="html" scope="external">Some text</xref>

The window:a123456 will later be rewritten as a regular http URL which is not known at authoring time.

However, the Enhanced Completeness Check flags every such occurrence as a warning:

External/Peer reference to "Url" on
xref element in "<topic name=">" is not
represented in a correct format.

The DITA spec says that the above xref element is valid DITA. However, Enhanced Completeness Check is getting in my way.

This is actually fairly inconvenient behavior. I'm looking for a way to turn this off. Alternatively, I'd like to know exactly what Enhanced Completeness Check does and if there is a way to customize it.

Thanks for any assistance.

Cheers,

Tony

--
Tony Morales
Information Tools Architect
Oracle Corporation

[ebenton]

I don't use DITA and I don't use Editor 5.4 M060 yet. With that in mind, can you not disable the warnings that you are getting by editing preferences?

[ClayHelberg]

Hi Tony--

I poked around a little and found a function that seems to disable
invalid URL checking:

dita::setDitaSuppressInvalidURLMessages(value, save=0)

You can set the "value" parameter to "always", "dmp", "ecc" (enhanced
completeness checking), "ecc+dmp" or "never". Set the "save" parameter
to 1 to make the setting persistent.

I didn't find anything obvious for stopping it from trying to check
links to external web pages, but it might be in there somewhere. Most of
the code for this seems to be in the file
$ARBORTEXT/application/com.arbortext.dita/scripts/dita.acl. It might be
worth poking around in some of the other files in that directory too, if
you don't find what you're looking for in that specific file.

Good luck.

--Clay