Is there a downside to having too many circular references?

Question

When we open a publication in Pub Manager, we see a lot of error messages about circular references. These are occasioned by the following scenario: 1. Topic A has a conref to an element in Topic B 2. Topic B has a conref to an element in Topic A 
 Because this scenario is valid DITA, I learned to ignore the messages. But I'd like to know if there's a downside. Recently, Pub Manager started crashing when we tried to open a pub with a lot of these cross-references. I think we isolated the cause to something else, but it left me wondering. Does anyone know if there's an adverse affect to having too many of these circular references? For example, does it slow down Tridion Docs or cause other processing issues?

Trish Billard · Accepted Answer

Although it is possible to conref from one topic to another, and create circular references, doing a lot of it can result in "spaghetti code." This spaghetti code can at some point down the road, prevent you from being able to release a publication, because something in that publication depends on some other thing being in a released state, but that thing can't be released because it conrefs something that isn't released, and so on. Eventually, someone will want to change an item that is conref'd. Then what? How will they know what will be affected by that change? How to they know it's been conref'd? 
 So, when you have a small number of items to keep track of, you might be able to manage it, but once you start scaling up and getting multiple writers, the complexity gets you. 
 There are some existing posts out there that discuss best practices for reuse, which suggest keeping a set of source topics in a particular part of the repository, and only conref from those specific topics. For example, you might have a topic full of common alerts, and all your other topics grab the alerts from those topics. See DITA Best Practices (Laura Bellamy, Michelle Carey, Jenifer Schlotfeldt), and for a quick illustration of what I'm talking about, see https://www.ditawriter.com/specializing-conref-target-topics-to-avoid-spaghetti-code/

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Is there a downside to having too many circular references?

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