Update TOC automatically?

[pdxwordsmith]

I've searched and searched, but haven't found the answer to my question....

I have a nice TOC, but then I go and change the text in some of the headings in the linked topics. How do I get the TOC to reflect the new text? I figured I could just open the TOC and select Tools > Update Cross References, but that's not available.

Help?

Thanks.

[Andrew]

Delete the entry, and re-enter. That's the only method I know of. Well, or manually change it.

Yeah, it's really annoying. You should submit a feature request here:
https://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

[RamonS]

While it may be annoying in this case, some do not want to have the ToC entries feed off the headings, typically when the headings are too long for a reasonable ToC entry. Any across the board updating would need another feature to protect custom ToC entries.

[Andrew]

Good point. If MadCap decides to design a fix for this, it needs to have some smarts.

[pdxwordsmith]

Why not what I suggest - have the process be a "manual automatic" update - select Tools > Update Cross References on the TOC?

Even Word has this functionality...

[Andrew]

Why not what I suggest - have the process be a "manual automatic" update - select Tools > Update Cross References on the TOC?

Even Word has this functionality...

It could. It just means that anyone who has TOC entries they specifically do not want to change (in addition to ones they do) couldn't use it.

[pdxwordsmith]

If it worked like Update Cross References currently works, you would get a dialog with all the cross-references. You could then pick and choose which ones to update. No?

[LTinker68]

Or make it more like the Update Field option in Word, where you would right-click on a TOC entry and have an option to update the entry text. So there could be an update all option at the top of the TOC Editor and context-sensitive menus for updating specific entries.

[RamonS]

Still, if you have 20 custom entries but 200 standard entries it will be quite a piece of work to go through all those you want to have updated manually. I'd rather go through the work of protecting 20 once and then update across the board with a single click. That is much faster.

[DocuWil]

Maybe you can use it or not, but I have a project describing a lot of process references and created variables for the main headings (h1).
If you use such a variable in your heading of the topic and drag it in your TOC, you will see that the variable will be accepted.
So, if you afterwards have to change the name you only have to change the variable

TOC with variable.png

[pdxwordsmith]

Thanks. Cool, but awkward. Sigh.