Prompted to save ditamaps when no changes made

[jepry]

Often when closing a ditamap, XMetal 6 prompts “do you want to save changes to this ditamap?” when there haven't been any changes. Doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason, a colleague just tried opening six maps and immediately closing them, and it prompted her to save regarding two of them, but not the others, despite her having made no changes to any.

It's a little confusing for some of the writers who ask whether they should say yes or not, knowing for sure if they made any changes or not and can just say no, or saying yes but then having to commit to the repository and having no changes to note having made… and so on.

Anyone else notice this?

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[Derek Read]

This is probably because the DITA authoring functionality itself has made some changes, most likely by adding missing id attribute values or inserting navtitle attribute values.

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[jepry]

Thanks, so I just saved a duplicate copy of a ditamap, opened the original in XMetal, was prompted to save changes when closing and said yes, opened it again, was prompted again and said yes again. Then I compared the ditamap file to the duplicate copy using Beyond Compare, and they're identical. I also tried to commit the file in the SVN repository and SVN tells me “no changes to commit”.

So Xmetal might be adding something, or trying to, but it's not adding or changing IDS or tags or anything visible to me or the file system.

The good news is that it wouldn't really seem to matter whether you say yes to the prompt or not, since it doesn't change anything.

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[Derek Read]

Please let me know the full version number of your copy of XMetaL Author Enterprise so I can report the issue. This number is listed in the “About” dialog box (Help > About XMetaL Author Enterprise).

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[jepry]

Sure:

Version#: 6.0.1.030

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[Derek Read]

I see an old bug in our system from 2007 that sounds like the same thing but it only occurred in our 5.x releases prior to 5.1.

The issue was that any map that was opened would be considered “dirty” if the “Update All References” function was set to run when maps open (the same function that runs when you press F11). Basically the “Update All References” code (which does various things including updating the navtitle attribute value in topicref elements inside maps) would set attributes in the file even if the attribute value being set was the same as the current value. This was addressed in 2007 with our 5.1 release.

The reproduction steps from that bug report are as follows:
1. Open any map in the Map Editor that contains at least one that points to an existing file.
2. Close the map. You are prompted to save.

This would affect every map every time it was opened provided this option was enabled and the map contained a topicref element that pointed to a proper DITA topic: Tools > DITA Options > Update Content (tab) > Refresh references when opening maps (checkbox)

I've tried this with a map opening into “XML View of Map” (Tags On view) as well and cannot reproduce the issue yet. I'm testing with both version 6.0.1.030 and the current release, which is 6.0.2.070. All files are stored on my local machine and no CMS is involved.

Are your steps different? Perhaps there is something else going on for you that is triggering the problem.
Do you have an integration with a CMS installed or other 3rd party software that integrates with XMetaL?

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[jepry]

Interesting, thanks.

So yes, if I uncheck the “refresh references when opening maps” option then XMetal doesn't prompt me to save the map anymore. So that seems to be what's going on.

It does seem to differ from what you describe in the bug here:

This would affect every map every time it was opened provided this option was enabled and the map contained a topicref element that pointed to a proper DITA topic

because it doesn't prompt to save some maps, even though they do contain topicrefs that point to dita topics, just as the first one does.

I checked earlier to see if it mattered if the dita structure was valid or invalid– one of the maps has invalid dita structure that we decided to just live with to get the modifications we need, and everything works fine in ouput and etc — but I checked on other maps that show valid structure and it prompts to save some of them as well.

Nothing that integrates with Xmetal, we just save the source files into a repository after closing out of Xmetal.

Again, this isn't really a problem at least now that I know we can just tell people to say yes to the prompt, we can certainly just live with it. I do want to leave the refresh references option on, just to always flag any broken links.

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