General Topics

Generic Source Formats

Generic source formats are the equivalent, for generic Source records, of source template formats for templated Source records (that is, Source records created as "Source from Template").  Source template formats are defined in Source Template records.  That means that when you define a source template format, in a particular Source Template record, the format will not be used by all templated Source records.  It will only be used by templated Source records that are linked to that particular Source Template record.  By contrast, if you define a generic source format, this will be used by all generic Source records. 

There are 4 types of source template formats.  These are:

• Record Title Format - used in the auto-generation of record titles from other fields
• Bibliography Format - used to generate Bibliography entries in reports and books that have a Bibliography section.  You might assume that you will get one Bibliography entry for each Source record cited in the report or book, but this is not necessarily correct.  The Bibliography section is always in alphabetical order, and duplicate entries are merged into a entry.  This fact should be borne in mind when designing bibliography formats.
• Footnote Format - used to generate source citations in the Sources section of reports, books and websites that have a Sources section.
• Short Footnote Format - a variant on the Footnote Format, available, optionally, for repeated citations to the same source.

By contrast there are only 3 types of generic source formats: Bibliography, Footnote and Short footnote.  The Record Title Format is not used with generic Source records, because auto-generation of record titles is not supported for generic Source records.

Source template formats are made up of text and expressions.  There are 4 kinds of expression.  These are:

• Field codes
• Data References
• Functions
• Angle bracket expressions

All of these can be used in generic source formats except field codes.  There is no equivalent of field codes for generic source formats.  However, on the plus side, you can specify generic source formats at a high level by choosing options in the Generic Source Formats dialog using point-and-click.  If you want a greater level of control over generic source formats, you will need (for each format type) to tick the 'Customize' option in that dialog, and manually edit the format itself.  At this level, generic source formats tend to be more complicated than source template formats.  To learn how to manually construct generic source formats, see Source Template Formats.  The process is essentially the same except that you can't use field codes.  It is true that most of the examples on that page make use of field codes (e.g. within angle bracket expressions), but other expressions work just as well, so the instructions are still relevant to generic source formats.