Re: DITA conref resolution (& xalan & ant & ...)

[Fred Baube <fr...@metadoc.fi>]

It seems that conref's are resolved at 
 a later processing stage.  More below.

Quoting Jeff Levitt:

> --- Fred Baube <fr...@metadoc.fi> wrote:

> > I'm generating the PDF's in a servlet, using stylesheets 
> > straight from DITAOT-1.0, and Xalan.  I'm finding that 
> > many parameters are missing from the final output. 
[..]
> > If I examine the source, I find that the XML element
> > 	<ph conref="adminconrefs.dita#prod/productshortname"/>
> > has not been replaced.  It and many other properties are
> > defined in adminconrefs.dita .  
> > 
> > So, my Xalan environment in my servlet is not successfully 
> > resolving these conref's.  What am I missing ?

> Fred, 
> 
> I had similar problems before I started using the ant build 
> in the dita toolkit.   I had to manually copy the merged dita 
> file that I created with xalan using topicmerge.xsl over to 
> my FOP directory in order for FOP to create a pdf.  However, 
> the merged dita file did not include the information in the 
> conrefs file, so I ended up not having those resolve in my 
> PDF.  I ended up copying the conrefs file (adminconrefs.dita 
> for example) to the FOP directory as well, and they ended up 
> resolving.  
> 
> So its hard to say where you need to put the adminconrefs.dita 
> file based on the information you have provided.  Without knowing 
> how you set up your servlet, I can't say where it needs to go. 
> But I can definitely say that you need to copy it to wherever 
> your merged ditafile ends up during processing.  If you can 
> explain more on how your servlet is set up (directories, process, 
> etc.), I can maybe give you a more definitive answer, although 
> based on what I just told you, you may resolve it without any 
> further help.

Within my servlet, I have the DITA source docs in a database 
and I've installed my own URIResolver to fetch them when Xalan 
asks for them.  When I run topicmerge.xsl over them, Xalan asks 
my URIResolver for all the topics, which are successfully pulled 
in, but it never asks for adminconrefs.dita !  

But you seem to be saying that these conref's that point to
adminconrefs.dita are not resolved until a later processing 
stage -- which strikes me as quite odd.  Apparently either 
in the stage of DITA->FO, or in the stage of FO->PDF.  

Is it really possible that the conref's are resolved in FO->PDF ?
In which case I have to investigate this:

	http://xml.apache.org/fop/embedding.html

It seems more likely that I can use a URIResolver for DITA->FO. 


Does anyone have any war stories that are relevant here ? 


thanks much,

fred baube