Variables for Topics

[midocsc]

Hi, I'm new here

I have a question regarding Topics and Page layouts:

So i have a rather large maintenance manual, which will be an compilation of multiple maintenance instructions with a bit of framework around. I made each Maintenance Instruction its own topic (or a series of topics).
Now these maintenance instructions have all been created and released at diffferent dates and have different document numbers and i would like to place a Variable in the page layouts footer where the Date, Document number and release status of each of these maintenance instructions is displayed.
Is there a way to set a variable like this, and give it its own value within a topic? So basically i can give the topic a document number etc and it will automatically be displayed in the footer?

So far the only thing that i have been managing to make work SOMEWHAT is assinging a heading display for H5 and H6 in the page layout (since I dont use those in my actual documents otherwise) and making an invisible h5 and h6 heading at the cover sheet of each topic. This kinda messes up my TOCs though, and i dont actually have enough heading types open do put all 3 Variables into my documents like this.

Do you have any suggestions on how i could solve this issue elegantly?

Thanks in advace,
Saskia

[zappy0]

Could you leverage the Volume Number property (assuming you don't already use it)? However, incrementing the Volume Number appears to require a chapter break, so this solution may not work if you have topics within chapters and each of those topics needs a unique variable. If you are not using chapter breaks, then maybe this can work. If each of your unique topic(s) is a chapter then this could work well.

1. Right-click each top-level topic, that needs a variable, in the TOC and select Properties.
2. Click Printed Output.
3. Set the Break Type to Chapter Break. Set the page layout to the page layout you are using.
4. Click Auto-numbers.
5. In the Volume Number area, click the 'Reset to' option and type the "Date, Document number and release status" you want to display. Perhaps something such as "July 30, 2024 MI-09876 PUBLISHED"
6. Set the Format to Text.
7. Click OK to close the Properties dialog box.
8. You are probably using the same Page Layout for most of these topics. Add the System.VolumeNumber variable to the page footer. Don't forget to click the Save button when you change the page footer. When you generate the PDF, the footer will pick up the value from the topic properties.

If you have topics in the TOC within another topic (i.e. pages in a chapter), then all of those topics pick up the Volume Number. You cannot set a unique Volume Number for each of those sub-topics as near as I can tell.

I did a quick test and this works but I have no idea what using Volume Numbers in this way might break. So, if you try this, first make a backup of your project in case you need to roll back.

volume_num.png

[AlexFox]

Hi, welcome to the Forums!

You could put these variables into a snippet, and include that snippet in every topic you need to, then set the values for those variables at snippet level within each topic.

Hope this helps!

[zappy0]

You could put these variables into a snippet, and include that snippet in every topic you need to, then set the values for those variables at snippet level within each topic.

That is a way better and brilliant solution. Kind of mad at myself for not thinking of it Ignore my crazy idea please.