Bugs with unresolved cross-refs

[Thomas Michanek <tmi@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In February, there were some postings dealing with supposedly
unresolved cross-references that were in fact correct, or even
the other way around.

I have found a situation in which this problem occurs:
If you Update/Generate a book, and the book reports unresolved
cross-refs in a file, and you open that file and search for
"Unresolved Cross-references", you may very well find cross-refs
that in fact are *not* unresolved (in addition to the really 
unresolved ones).
However, if you before the search explicitly update all cross-refs
in that file, only the real unresolved ones will be found!

I have an idea on why this happens:
For each cross-reference in a file, FrameMaker stores the time
when the cross-ref was last updated, as well as a flag indicating
whether it was found unresolved. If you save the file to MIF,
you can find the time info as <XRefLastUpdate> statements, but
the "unresolved" flag is not stored in MIF. (You can easily check
this by saving a file with unresolved cross-refs to MIF, then
open the MIF file and try to search for unresolved cross-refs.)

When FrameMaker updates a book, *all* cross-references found in
all the files are copied into an invisible part of the book file.
You can check this by saving an updated book file to MIF; this is 
the reason why a book file increases its size after the first update.

I think that there's a problem setting the "unresolved" flag for
cross-refs in a file when cross-refs are updated from a book, as
opposed to when updating the cross-refs directly in the file.
Maybe the "unresolved" flag is also duplicated in the book file
and doesn't get "transferred" to the individual files?

Conclusion: before searching for unresolved cross-refs in a file,
be sure to explicitly update all cross-refs in that file (by
using Edit > Update references), even if you have just updated
the book. Otherwise you will find yourself replacing cross-refs
that are already perfectly OK.


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Thomas Michanek, Documentation Manager, Telelogic Tau
Telelogic AB, Teknikringen 9, SE-58330 Linkoping, SWEDEN
PHONE:  +46 (0)13 211450   <--  *** new from April 1 ***
EMAIL:  mailto:Thomas.Michanek@telelogic.com
WWW 1:  http://www.telelogic.com
WWW 2:  http://hem1.passagen.se/framers
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See you at the Telelogic User Conference '99, May 19-21, in
Barcelona, Spain: http://www.telelogic.com/news/userconf.asp


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