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Overview of S1000D Validate

You can use the S1000D Validate tool to validate references for DMs, PMs, SCPMs (SCORM Content Package Modules), and graphics. You can also check whether modules are in compliance with their Business Rules Exchange (BREX).

Validating References

Use the Validate References option to check if the target of a reference exists in the Contenta database. Validation is done for modules and graphics that are referenced in DMs, PMs (modules only), and SCPMs; the tool also checks references from other modules to the module or graphic.

You can validate a single object or a container of objects. For example, if you navigate to the Data Modules section of the CSDB hierarchy, select a subsystem object and run S1000D Validate, the tool validates the references in all the DMs in all the subsubsystems under that subsystem. If you validate a container of objects that contains graphics, S1000D Validate reports references to the graphics from DMs and SCPMs.

Validating BREX

The BREX is a DM that is referenced in the identification and status section of the DM. The BREX DM contains the business rules established by your project, organization, or S1000D which include rules for authoring. For example, rules may define elements and/or attributes that are allowed and/or required in the DM, PM, or SCPM, values permitted in the attributes, language (such as British English or American English) and so on.

To determine the BREX DM being used, refer to the Data Module Code within the brexDmRef tag in DMs, PMs, or SCPMs (Issue 4.1 and higher), the brexDmRef tag in DMs only (Issue 4.0), or the brexref tag in DMs only (Issue 3.0). Note that the BREX DM typically contains a reference to a higher level BREX DM. This is referred to as a layered BREX. The higher layer BREX defines the rules of the overall organization whereas the lower layer BREX defines those of your division or the project itself. The highest level BREX is the S1000D default BREX DM.

The Validate BREX option validates against all BREX layers and can be used on a single data module or a container of objects.

BREX DMs may contain context-sensitive rules that apply only to modules that use the specified schema. For example, rules in a BREX DM section containing the following markup would apply only to Issue 4.2 procedural DMs:

<contextRules rulesContext="http://www.s1000d.org/S1000D_4-2/xml_schema_flat/proced.xsd">…</contextRules>

BREX rules in a contextRules section without a rulesContext attribute apply to all types of DMs, PMs, and SCPMs.

The Validate BREX tool checks for context-sensitive BREX rules and skips any rules that do not apply to the module being validated.

S1000D Validate may also be run from within Arbortext or Oxygen XML editor.