Cross-references to a paragraph within a clause

Is there a way to make an outside cross-reference to one of the paragraphs of the clause rather than to an entire clause?

Hi Tomas,

Unfortunately, there is no such possibility. The reason is that it can easily become unpredictable where the reference would end up due to the possibly dynamic nature of the document as a whole and the target clause in particular.

For example, assume there would a possibility to state §liability_b3 to refer to the 3rd bullet of the clause tagged with tag “liability”.

  • A first issue is that you cannot be sure which clause ends up being tagged with “liability”. Maybe only one such clause exists in your firm’s standard library, but your colleage may have a second clause in his own personal library that he inserted. Quite probably, the 3rd bullet in both clauses will be different.
  • A second issue is that, even when you can be sure which target clause you are talking about, this target clause may show different bullets under different circumstances, depending on certain datafields. Or the target clause may have a few bullets attached to it through “descendant” paragraphs, one of which may end up being the 3rd bullet.

Do these constraints make sense in your scenario? As you know, we are always open to discussion, so maybe we are missing a use case where the above concerns are not relevant.

Thank you, Maarten. I understand the complexity behind. The scenario I face is the following.

In a clause, I make a cross-reference (using a cross-tag) to another clause (clause 8) which has two paragraphs. The cross-reference is aimed at these two paragraphs, i.e. to the entire clause. All is fine as long as this other clause has its title, since the cross-reference refers to the entire clause. However, if I want to lose the title, i.e. by merging the clause with a preceding clause, ClauseBase replaces the cross-reference with a cross-reference to the first paragraph of that clause (7.3), which is not my intention, since I want it to keep the cross-reference to both paragraphs (7.3 and 7.4) rather than the first paragraph only.

Cross-reference to a separate clause (ignore identical titles):

image

Cross-reference to a merged clause:

image

Naturally, I would want the cross-reference to alter itself to “clauses 7.3-7.4”.

Of course, you could restructure the clauses and thus avoid this issue, but I guess this issue could arise in other cases as well, once users decide to merge clauses with cross-references.

Hi Tomas, this is indeed a completely different kind of problem than the one I described.

At first sight this seems feasible to implement, I’ll add it to the todo-list and move this topic to the requested features forum.

Small update: we had an internal discussion about your request, and agree that what you suggest is indeed desired behaviour for the software.

That being said, it requires some difficult changes “under the hood”, so we will postpone this change until after we launched our Word plugin (expected in beta version in the coming weeks).

Great. Thanks!