How can I disable auto population of navtitles in maps?

[joepairman]

XMetaL Author Enterprise 5.5, SP1.

When I open a map, I don't want the topic titles to replace the existing navtitles. I want to keep the existing navtitles. What file or files should I be looking at to change this behavior?

Thanks for any tips.

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[Derek Read]

If you give the locktitle attribute the value “yes” your navtitle values should be left in place.

If you are using the Topic Reference Properties dialog to browse for topics and set attributes:
1. Select the “Special attributes” tab.
2. From the “Navigation title” drop drop select “Specify other title”.
3. Dismiss the dialog. The locktitle attribute should be set to “yes” and this topicref will have its navtitle left alone (by our product).

You can also set or modify the text for the navtitle in the next textbox just below labeled “Specify” (which is perhaps not the best label but in context it sort of makes sense).

If you are working directly with tags and attributes in Tags On or Plain Text you can use the Attribute Inspector to set the locktitle attribute.

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[joepairman]

Thanks, Derek. However, I can't use locktitle for this purpose. It's reserved for a specific effect in our stylesheet.  And rather than doing this on a topic-by-topic basis, I'd like to make this a global setting: that XMetaL should never auto-populate the navtitles. Is there a file I can edit for that?

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[Derek Read]

Can you not use a different attribute for your purpose?
The DITA Language Reference states the following:

This attribute makes sure the navtitle attribute is used if it is present; if locktitle isn't set to “yes”, the navtitle attribute is ignored and text is retrieved from the target.

I'm not sure it makes sense to use it for anything else (officially of course, which we can't force anyone to do). At present I think disabling this would probably require hacking our code (for an immediate fix).

I will add this to our list of feature requests.

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[joepairman]

Thanks, Derek. I had taken that part of the spec to refer to output processing. That's what we plan to use locktitle for: to force the use of the navtitle in output in certain cases.

Where locktitle won't be used, we had planned to use the logical object name as the navtitle – a name that is consistent across versions, regardless of any title changes within the topic. But on reflection, it's OK to populate the navtitle with the topic title, and at least for now we can keep track of the logical name elsewhere.

Good to hear you made this a feature request.

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