The Issue

The @chunk="to-content" requirement for the QA plugin has always been a bit sticky. Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about it since we run the QA plugin through a self-service web server and that attribute is handled by a Python controller. However, thinking in terms of local builds, it became evident that setting the @chunk by hand would quickly become a tiresome routine.

Besides attribute handling, the web server also masks another consideration—the QA plugin may not be running in isolation from other plugins.

 The First Iteration

The first iteration of to move this functionality to the plugin itself resulted in a new build target extending the chunk preprocess.

In plugin.xml:

<feature extension="depend.preprocess.chunk.pre" value="setchunk"/>

The target in build_qadata.xml:

<target name="setchunk" description="Set @chunk to-content on the temp input bookmap" if="if.chunk">
<replace file="${dita.temp.dir}/${user.input.file}"
token="chunk=.to-content." value="" />
<replace file="${dita.temp.dir}/${user.input.file}"
token="&lt;bookmap " value="&lt;bookmap chunk='to-content' " />
<replace file="${dita.temp.dir}/${user.input.file}"
token="&lt;map " value="&lt;map chunk='to-content' " />
</target>

The new target used a regex replace to add the chunk attribute just before processing began in the temporary build directory. This solved the problem of manually setting the attribute, but also extended the chunk pre-processing to other sibling plugins as well.

The Solution

It’s possible to add an if-condition to a target to look for the presence of a command-line parameter, but I needed to look for a parameter with a specific value.  A second iteration added a double-hop if-condition to the ant call.

<condition property="if.chunk">
<equals arg1="${setchunk}" arg2="true" casesensitive="false" />
</condition>

<target name="setchunk" description="Set @chunk to-content on the temp input bookmap" if="if.chunk">
<replace file="${dita.temp.dir}/${user.input.file}"
token="chunk=.to-content." value="" />
<replace file="${dita.temp.dir}/${user.input.file}"
token="&lt;bookmap " value="&lt;bookmap chunk='to-content' " />
<replace file="${dita.temp.dir}/${user.input.file}"
token="&lt;map " value="&lt;map chunk='to-content' " />
</target>

This approach looks for the presence of the setchunk switch and a value of true before applying the target, which is called with:

dita -f qa -i samples/taskbook.ditamap -Dsetchunk=true

So if you run the QA plugin alongside any others, you can leave off the switch to avoid unwanted chunk attributes.

As part of a new framework enhancement, I needed a method to ensure that certain DITA elements carried unique @id values. Our authoring tool does a good job identifying duplicate @id values within a topic, but does not indicate whether those values also exist in other topics referenced in the DITA map.

In this case, the best fit was to add a new check to the QA plugin.

The check should:

• Identify duplicate @id values on specific elements
• Return only distinct values (i.e. if 123 appears several times, then return 123 only once)

After some forum research, my first thought was to use a key match.

<xsl:key name="duplicateIds" match="elementName" use="@id" />

And reference it with

key('duplicateIds',@id)[2] and count(.|key('duplicateIds', @id)[1]) = 1

So the if statement for the check looked like

<xsl:for-each select="//parentElement">
<xsl:if test="key('duplicateIds',@id)[2] and count(.|key('duplicateIds', @id)[1]) = 1">
Remove duplicate elementName @id=<xsl:value-of select="@id"/>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:for-each>

Even though it met my requirements, it’s still an outdated approach that didn’t leave me with a job-well-done sense of completion. I wanted a cleaner solution that fit somewhere closer to the 2.0 realm.

I decided to use grouping to identify each distinct @id value. Then I could wrap an if statement to test for any groups that contained a second (duplicate) item. The result:

<xsl:for-each-group select="//elementName" group-by="@id">
<xsl:if test="current-group()[2]">
Remove duplicate elementName @id=<xsl:value-of select="@id"/>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:for-each-group>

Have a better approach? Leave a comment.

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