special characters in xml map view

[gcrews]

forgive me if this has been asked before or i am missing something simple.
I am using Xmetal 6.

Say I have a topic with a title of “Bla<>Bla”
Xmetal correctly encodes it in the text view as “Bla<>Bla”
If i then insert that topic into a map or update the topic reference in XML view mode it populates the view. At the same time though it populates the navtitle with navtitle=”Bla<>Bla” witch causes all sorts of validation errors. When it does have the correct encoding after switching from map view and not refreshing the references it shows all character encoding in the XML tag view.

Am i just missing an encoding instruction tag or something that would fix that or is that a bug in xmetal?

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[Derek Read]

This is a bug.

Of the characters that one should be concerned about being escaped in the navtitle attribute (ie: written as entities) in order to pass XML validation there are two that would potentially cause errors, those are < and " (less than and double quotation). Looks like our currrent release handles the double quote case correctly and writes the entity " but does not write out < unfortunately. The code that runs when “Refresh All References” is performed (F11 and some other events trigger this) does the right thing in the Map Editor (when the map is open in a tab in the Resource Manager). It is when the map is open in XML View of Map (Tags On or Normal view) and Refresh All References is triggered that this gets messed up. One good thing is that our validator (which is independent of the DITA scripts that mess this up) function as they always have and so you are at least warned when saving that the document is invalid, so you can then open the Attribute Inspector and fix the bad navtitle. I'll check on the status when I get into the office next week. I don't think I have an easy fix for it, but I'll check that as well.

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