I’m implementing a feature of DITA which involves pulling together all the DITA maps and submaps linked from a root map so that you can then process them as a single unit in order to then construct “key spaces”, which are defined by the topicrefs contained in the maps and which depend on both the structural hierarchy defined by the tree of maps and submaps and on the markup details of both the maps and the topicref elements. It’s a challenging bit of data processing.
In other contexts where I’ve implemented this processing I start by creating a “resolved map” using a relatively simple transform, resulting in a single XML document with all the stuff needed to then construct the DITA key space. With the resolved map, the logic to construct the key space is a relatively simple three-phase process.
My naïve attempt to do this in BaseX using the normal typeswitch approach to implement an identity transform worked at a small scale, but for our real DITA maps, which have 10s of 1000s of elements, the process quickly exhausts the 2GB of RAM allocated to BaseX GUI.
The reason I’m doing the transform in XQuery and not just using Saxon via the XSLT module is because I need to annotate the resulting resolved map with the database node IDs of each element so I can then capture those details in the final key space, which I’m storing as XML in another database—the constructed key space acts as an index where the input is a context element/key name pair and the result is the topicref element that defines the key, from which I can then get the resource associated with that topicref (i.e., the topic it references or a string it defines or whatever it might be).
So my first question is: Is there a general technique for doing this kind of identity transform that won’t blow up the memory? I suspect the answer is “no” but figured I’d ask.
Or is it possible to apply a Saxon transform to content pulled from the BaseX database and have access to the node IDs? I didn’t immediately see a way that you could do that. There must be a pretty sharp separation between BaseX and Saxon here, but again, maybe I missed something?
If the answer is “no” I can work out a more sophisticated way to build the initial data from which the key space is ultimately constructed by walking the map tree and populating XQuery maps or something, but I was hoping to keep my simple code that just operates on the resolved map.
Thanks,
Eliot _____________________________________________ Eliot Kimber Sr Staff Content Engineer O: 512 554 9368 M: 512 554 9368 servicenow.comhttps://www.servicenow.com LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/servicenow | Twitterhttps://twitter.com/servicenow | YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/user/servicenowinc | Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/servicenow