Troubleshooting tip for the DITA Open Toolkit install

Thanks to David Brainard for figuring out the basic problem! At BMC, we all have a Documentum client installed on our desktops, so with the 4i client, my Classpath contained C:\Program Files\Documentum\Shared\dfc.jar. Apparently there is a collision of some sort between Documentum's dfc.jar and DITA's lib\dost.jar in the classpath which prevented the DITA Open Toolkit from running, manifesting itself as errors finding resource\messages.xml.

In my case, the fix was to remove the reference to C:\Program Files\Documentum\Shared\dfc.jar from my Classpath environment variable. Since this discovery, I've upgraded to Documentum 5 client, and there is no longer a collision. The Documentum 5 client inserted "C:\Program Files\Documentum\dctm.jar" in my classpath, but the DITA Open Toolkit doesn't seem to mind that.

Apparently other applications can be "classpath hogs" so to speak, so if you get a "can't find resource\messages.xml" error message, remove other items from your Classpath variable one-by-one until you find the culprit. In my case, we created a simple "run.bat" file that contained only:

set CLASSPATH=C:\saxon\saxon.jar;C:\ant\apache-ant-1.6.5;\lib\dost.jar;.

ant demo.faq

Couple of notes about this batch file - the dot at the end is for your current directory. We chose to do ant demo.faq rather than ant all because it won't take as long if the build is successful. An "ant all" build can take anywhere from 2-13 minutes. 

By setting the classpath just for this session and running this batch file within the DITA-OT-1.2.2 directory, we could pinpoint that it was my Classpath that was the issue, and then remove entries one by one. It's a handy troubleshooting tip. Thanks again Dave!