Duplicate IDs when Saving as XML

[Bernard Aschwanden]

Are your source files already structured, or do you export to XML using the FM "Save As" feature? If they are already structured then you may want to check out the xref tools from West Street Consulting (the website is http://www.weststreetconsulting.com) to help 'uniqu-ify' the ID values.

Hope that helps,

Bernard



Bernard Aschwanden
Publishing Technologies Expert
Publishing Smarter

bernard at publishingsmarter.com 

www.publishingsmarter.com 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces+bernard=publishingsmarter.com at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces+bernard=publishingsmarter.com at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Karen West
Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2006 6:04 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Duplicate IDs when Saving as XML

As I have previously mentioned, I produce documentation using FrameMaker
70p579 and we are now attempting to get all of our documentation online in a help system, using a tool written in-house with our own software (a 4GL called Cyberscreen), while maintaining the existing documentation for PDF and print output. Initially my part in this was just to save the individual chapters of each book as xml, producing a .xml and .css for each chapter, plus make sure all the images were saved as gifs. As predicted by people on this list, we keep hitting problems with the XML; last month the problem was related to formatting that was applied using the toolbar and not character and paragraph tags, which I'm currently resolving.

The latest problem is that there are duplicate IDs in the XML. A Google has hinted that this is as a result of copying and pasting within chapters. 

Here's an example of the problem from the guy who's developing the XML parsing tool:

-------------------

This is a link to a location labelled "Installation", i.e. the XML says

<Numbered>
<A ID="pgfId-4937884"></A>
Install the client and server software - see <A href="install.xml#id(Installation)" xml:link="simple" show="replace"
actuate="user" CLASS="XRef">
<Hypertext>
"</Hypertext>
<Emphasis>Software Installation</Emphasis> <NoEmphasis> ", page 78</NoEmphasis> </A>. </Numbered>

Unfortunately there are SEVEN places in this document where the XML contains

<A ID="Installation"></A>

and as "page 78" means nothing to my scripts they can't tell which of them is intended.

--------------

Does anyone know a way of identifying these duplicate ids and more importantly how to avoid creating them in the first place.

TIA

Karen West
Technical Writer
Cyberscience Corp UK
http://www.cyberscience.com

_______________________________________________


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