About articles autonaming
Contents
On the Edit > Preferences > Extra > General, select Auto Name New Article in Fred4. |
You can set the TOOL parameters for library objects to a (default) name to use when creating articles with such object. The naming convention is customizable, and it can be the same or different for every object in the library. You can construct article name from any of the following seven variables (in any combination): title, edition, section, zone and layer name, page number, and the ordinal number. The variables are read from the current page, therefore the values will be different for different titles, editions, sections, zones, layers and page numbers. The variables, available to construct article name are: &t page's title name &e page's edition name &s page's section &z page's zone &n page's number &l current layer name &a total number of articles linked to the page + 1 - so it will be 1 if there are no articles linked to the page
It is recommended to use at &n and &a always. Each variable part can be followed by a 'substring' specification in square brackets, so that '&t[2,3]' means 3 characters of the title name starting from the second one. If the second value is greater than the variable string length, zeros are added at the beginning to obtain the requested length, e.g &n[1,4] produces 0001, 0125 and so on. If the TOOL parameters are set to select an article, the name is presented to the user as the default, if the TOOL parameters are set to create the article, the name is used directly for the creation. The dialog box display is controlled by a custom preference, as explained in Control autonaming behavior. Control autonaming behavior The automatic naming of articles, based on library objects with the autonaming tool enabled, typically prompts you for the name, desk and folder, in a dialog box where you can review or modify the predefined name, desk and folder. This may be unsuitable if you want to create a series of articles, based on a full-page template. In such case, you may want all articles to be created with the predefined names and in the same desk and folder as the first one. In order to achieve it, enable appropriate prompting type in custom preferences. To enable prompting only on the first article created (in session), when the pop-up menu below is displayed: point Auto naming with Tool and then click Prompt only on the first article (in session). |
Important note: if you use a library object to create articles on a given page, then delete articles from the page, and then re-use the library object again on the same page, this will cause troubles, since the articles with specified name will already exist in the database.