---
title: "DITA: Limitations with the chunk=”to-content” attribute in relationship tables"
date: 2014-05-02
description: "My DITA journey   1.0 My DITA journey begins   1.1 DITA: Folder hierarchy, conref, mapref, and..."
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2014/05/02/dita-limitations-with-the-chunkto-content-attribute-in-relationship-tables/
---
# DITA: Limitations with the chunk=”to-content” attribute in relationship tables
DITA has a lot of powerful ways to combine different topics through ditamaps. Although DITA's architecture encourages a lot of little pieces of content, you can bring these pieces together into articles of more substance. By having smaller chunks of information, you have more capability for re-use into various combinations and outputs. 

Here's an example of chunking. Here I have a task of changing a tire, which involves 5 topics (1 overview topic and 4 task topics). 

Each of the subtasks is a task topic with a list of steps. In this hypothetical example, the steps are fairly minimal. The task element allows just one set of steps per topic, which is why the content is split into multiple files. The overview topic is a concept topic. In reality, it's not more than a paragraph long. It could preface the first task topic, but then the first task topic wouldn't look like a subheading underneath the overview.

By adding the attribute `chunk="to-content"`, the Open Toolkit will merge all of the topics to the same content. The reader will see one article. 

You don't have to use `topicset` element for this. You could also do the following: 

The `topicset` method gives you a way of re-using the same set of topics in another map without including the whole list of topics.

## Where the problems begins

The `topicset` content looks fine in a table of contents — it appears as a single unit of information. However, when you add the `topicset` in a relationship table, using the `topicsetref` ID, the Open Toolkit can't process it correctly. The link simply doesn't work because the Open Toolkit seems to require actual files in order to process the relationships. The `topicsetref` isn't a file — it's an ID that includes several files.

There are several ways to handle the issue, which I'll explore in detail. None of the workarounds really solves the problem.

## Discrete little topics

One common workaround is to avoid the `chunk` attribute altogether and instead to just use little topics in your help. You can still group the topics in the same folder, and with a table of contents navigation, the user can jump from one topic to the next. Each page will contain a link to its parent topic, which helps avoid information fragmentation.