DITA Open Toolkit

Adding diagnostic messages

Plug-in specific warning and error messages can be added to the set of messages supplied by the DITA-OT. These messages can then be used by any XSLT override.

dita.xsl.messages
Add new messages to diagnostic message file.

Example

To add your own messages, create the new messages in an XML file such as myMessages.xml:

<dummy>
  <!-- See resources/messages.xml for the details. -->
  <message id="DOTXmy-msg-numW" type="WARN">
    <reason>Message text</reason>
    <response>How to resolve</response>
  </message>
</dummy>
There are three components to the message ID:
  1. The prefix DOTX is used by all DITA-OT XSLT transforms, and must be part of the ID.
  2. This is followed by the message number ("my-msg-num" in the sample above). By convention, this should be a three digit integer.
  3. Finally, a letter corresponds to the severity. This should be one of:
    • I = Informational, used with type="INFO"
    • W = Warning, used with type="WARN"
    • E = Error, used with type="ERROR"
    • F = Fatal, used with type="FATAL"

Once the message file is defined, it is incorporated with this extension: 

<plugin id="com.example.newmsg">
  <feature extension="dita.xsl.messages" file="myMessages.xml"/>
</plugin>

XSLT modules can then generate the message using the following call: 

<xsl:call-template name="output-message">
  <xsl:with-param name="msgnum">my-msg-num</xsl:with-param>
  <xsl:with-param name="msgsev">W</xsl:with-param>
</xsl:call-template>