Cross-Reference list when inserting Cross Reference

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

I have an Element called "Scene", which consists of two child Elements: "SceneDate" and "SceneNumber", respectively.

The "SceneDate" Element has autonumbering that is populated based on the "NewDay" and "Month" attributes on the "Scene" element:

The "SceneNumber" element has autonumbering that simply numbers from 1 onwards:

Nothing unusual about these element and they're working as expected. This EDD is used in a Master document.

I have another EDD that is used in a different document, which will cross-reference back to the "SceneDate" and "SceneNumber" elements in the Master document. In the EDD for this document I have "CrossReference_Date" and CrossReference_Date" elements:

Again, these work as expected.

Here comes the 'difficulty' I'm having:

I have another element, "Flashback_Date" that is a cross-reference back to the "SceneDate" element.  The "SceneNumber" will always be unique, but the "SceneDate" could be the same for  multiple instances, so I see the same date mutliple times, but I don't know which "SceneNumber" they relate to:

So selecting the correct cross-reference is difficult because I don't know which "SceneDate" relates to which "SceneNumber".

Is there a way to combine the two elements in the Elements list to see the content of both the SceneNumber and SceneDate Elements? Is there a way to manage this better? 

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

Looks like SceneDate and SceneNumber are metadata, and thus should be attributes of the scene and not elements with content.

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

@Matt-Tech Comm Tools The reasons they are elements and not attributes is because

• the values are not static and need to update dynamically 
• the SceneNumber has to be automatically numbered incrementally and should auto renumber if a scene is moved.
• the first digit of the SceneDate has to be increased incrementally/reset based on the value of the NewDay attribute on the Scene element. Because there is no way to generate actual dates without the use of scripts, I use the context rules to generate the correct date. Similarly to the SceneNumber, if a scene is moved, the SceneDate has to update accordingly.

I'm not aware of any way to achieve this with Attributes.

Also, if they are Attributes, how would I create a cross-reference to the SceneNumber or SceneDate?

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

Sounds like you're looking to use Fm as a project management tool. 

If there isn't a tool that does what you need, I imagine you'll need some custom scripting and FDK work done to take over and calculate the element and/or attribute values.

What product do studios usually use for this planning?

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

I'm not sure what products studios typically use for their project planning these days - I haven't been been keeping up with that industry for many years.

In my case, I use FM for planning my novels (admittedely, FM is probably not the right tool for this). Because I write my novels in FM, it makes it easier if all my planning is done in FM as well. This way, if I need to move things around, scene numbers and dates (purely for my own purposes and not part of the final manual) are updated to reflect where they fit into the story. This way I can cross-reference my planning notes in my novel during the writing phase. 

[frameexpert]

In the Cross-Reference dialog box, you can list elements by their id value. I can see a scenario, where a script goes through and assigns an id that concatenates the two values that you want to see. Note that some "illegal" id characters may have to be changed and ids need to be unique. You might have something like this:

id_scene-25_date-14-10-2017_998235

where the numeric suffix insures that the id is unique. The list will be sorted, so you may want the script to append a counter so that the ids appear in document order. In that case, you wouldn't need the "serial number" at the end. For example,

id_001_scene-25_date-14-10-2017

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

I'm not familiar with scripting, so can't comment on using a script.

Because the Scene Number and Date can change, the Element ID would change, which means that the cross-reference could now point to a completely different scene, e.g.

• Scene 25, dated 14/10/2017 (id_scene-25_date-14-10-2017) could be moved and becomes Scene 36, dated 25/10/2017 (id_scene-36_date-25-10-2017).
• All the scenes that were orignally after Scene 25, now gets renumbered, so what was Scene 26, dated 14/1/2017 (id_scene-26_date-14-10-2017) now becomes Scene 25, dated 14/01/2017 (id_scene-25_date-14-10-2017).
• My cross reference to the original Scene 25 (id_scene-25_date-14-10-2017) now points to the wrong Scene 25 (originally Scene 26)

For now I'm picking a SceneDate that 'looks' right, then I use the Go to source button to check and update the cross-reference as needed.