In FM 8 and 9, Xref generated text invisible and xref is reported broken

[shoose]

Hi all,

We were working in 8 and now in 9, and have not been able to solve this problem:

For xrefs to another document, the generated text (based on the srcfile attribute) is correct in the XML.  When we open it in Frame, sometimes it is invisible and also reported as broken. When you double click on it, Frame opens the target document of course, and we can see that the reference is indeed properly set.  If we click "Replace" in the xref dialog box to reset it -- even though there is nothing to reset --  the text does appear. We save and close, then reopen, and it is there.

But then it disappears again in subsequent uses.  References that we have set and reset continue to disappear and report as broken. Entire books that had no broken xrefs last week now have a raft of them.

This is an irritant when working, but critical when generating a PDF -- as of course, the text just doesn't show up.

Has anyone experienced xrefs that seem to continually break, along with disappearing text? Sorry I can't provide any more information than this: I am truly stumped.

Thanks,

Shelley Hoose

Rogue Wave Software

[Lynne A. Price]

Shelley,

Without looking at your documents, I cannot be sure what is causing your

cross-reference problems. I can, however, describe one possibility.

Since you are using the srcfile attribute, you must be working with

cross-references from one document to another. In order to create the

visible cross-reference text, when you open the referencing document,

FrameMaker must open the referenced document so it can extract the

necessary information. If, for some reason it is not able to open the

referenced document, the cross-reference will be unresolved and no

generated text will show. Suppose, for example, the referenced document

uses an unavailable font. The result when you open the referencing document

depends on whether the referenced document is open. If it is, the

cross-reference will import correctly. If the referenced document is not

open, FrameMaker will not be able to open it and will report unresolved

cross-references. There is no need to recreate the cross-references

manually--simply open the referenced document and use Edit > Update

References to update the cross-references.

You can easily confirm whether my guess does indeed explain your

situation. Open the referenced document. Do any alerts appear?

--Lynne

Lynne A. Price

Text Structure Consulting, Inc.

Specializing in structured FrameMaker consulting, application development,

and training

lprice@txstruct.com http://www.txstruct.com

voice/fax: (510) 583-1505 cell phone: (510) 421-2284

[Russ Ward]

Hi Shelley,

I work with xrefs in a similar fashion, I think, so I have a few comments in addition to what Lynne posted. In particular, these sentences in your post confused me some:

"For xrefs to another document, the generated text (based on the srcfile attribute) is correct in the XML.  When we open it in Frame, sometimes it is invisible and also reported as broken."

The "generated text" of an xref is not typically stored in an XML representation, unless you have some kind of special setup. The srcfile attribute will store the filename and the target element ID of the xref only, expecting that when reopened in Frame (or some other XML processor/publisher) the text will be requeried from the target doc and regenerated at the xref instance. For this reason, if you open an XML file with this type of xref, it cannot regenerate the text unless the target document is already open (that is, Frame won't automatically attempt to open docs just to discover the text for xref targets). So if the target doc is not currently open, the xref shows up with no text... just an xref object but it is still technically "resolved."

When this happens, it's like Lynne says... you'll need to do some kind of update action to force a regeneration. I use the book update utility to do this for a batch of files.

Another thing... I don't ever get these xrefs "reported as broken." I do see that the structure view omits the IDReference attribute until an xref is updated (FM7), which can show up as invalid if your EDD requires the attribute. I don't know why it works this way, but it doesn't seem to affect my workflow. Internally, the xrefs remain valid, as shown when you double-click one and see it resolved in the xref dialog box. I can open and save XML files with xrefs in this state without any problems, including the proper writing out of IDReference attributes even if they don't appear in the Structure View.

I hope this helps some.

Russ