Re: Xref link does not work when referecning topic...

kangxw · ‎Jun 19, 2019

Hi,

I am using Windchill Service information manager for technical publication.

We have a lot of xref in our documents. I found out that the xref doesn't work when I am trying to link a topic xincluded in another topic in publication structure when publishing to PDF.

For example, I have a topic1 with topic 1.1 and topic 1.2 inside it and a topic 2. When I am trying to xref topic 1.1 in topic 2, the link is broken. Both topic 1 and topic 2 are added to the publication structure or techinfomap.

I got a warning from WVS saying that "Item ... referenced from ...., but not included in the map".

Does anyone have any thoughts about this?

BTW, I have turned off usenewdita settings. We are using Windchill 11.1 and arbortext 7.1.

Thanks,

XW

ClayHelberg · ‎Jun 27, 2019

You are using xinclude to embed subtopics within topics? That's not the usual way to do it--usually topic structure would be built with the publication structure, where topics 1.1 and 1.2 are child objects of topic 1 in the pub structure, but topic 1 doesn't try to embed the child topics explicitly (with xinclude or file entity references).

I suspect you're having problems with the xrefs because SIM doesn't expect you to be using xincludes in this way, so it doesn't load the child topics into the map it generates from the pub structure.

You will probably have better luck if you remove the xincludes, and use nested pub structure items to define subtopic structure instead.

kangxw · ‎Jun 27, 2019

Hi Clay,

Thanks for you response.

My topic1 is like:

<topic>

<title>Topic 1</title>

<body>

...

</body>

<topic>

<title>topic1.1</title>

<body>

...

</body>

</topic>

<topic>

<title>topic1.2</title>

<body>

...

</body>

</topic>

I tried to build topic1.1 and topic 1.2 as topic 1 's child object in publication structure but I think I can not. In PS, it don't allow me to nest an information element under an information element. It just insert topic1.1 and topic1.2 below topic1 instead. See snapshot below.

I guess Windchill best practice is to make Topic1 a publication section and insert topic1.1 and 1.2 into it. However, in our case, there is body under Topic1 so I can't just make it as a Publication section. Please let me know if I am doing this right or this is other ways to nest topics.

Thanks,

Xuwei

kangxw · ‎Jun 27, 2019

The snapshot didn' t go well. Please check.

ClayHelberg · ‎Jun 27, 2019

I think you will need to create a section after topic 1, and put topic 1.1 and 1.2 into that section. You can turn off title rendering on that section so that it is merely a container and doesn't affect the TOC or main content, but it should set the desired nesting level. Something like this:

kangxw · ‎Jun 27, 2019

Thank you for your solution!

I tried to modify the attribute of section to exclude it in PS but didn't find a easy way to do it via Windchill UI. See attached snapshot. All of the options do not work for filtering 'sub' out. APE will create a section named sub with two topics in it.I think I will need to filter the sub section out in Styler and use xpath for topic numbers.

I guess this is also what PTC would suggest. However, it really add more difficulties when building publication structure with complex hierarchy.

Right now, I think everything else (even conref) worked fine when nesting topics inside topic except xref. I am thinking if there is a way to add additional nested xml documents check when publishing so that APE will know every objects that are included in the techinfomap.

Xref link does not work when referecning topics in Windchill

Xref link does not work when referecning topics in Windchill