Project Indexes are very useful for automatically generating tables of contents and other documentation lists, but they currently expose only a limited amount of information from the Layout Book structure.
Archicad already knows much more about each Layout. For example, Layouts can belong to hierarchical Subsets, and Autotext already provides information such as:
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Layout Number in Current Subset
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Number of Layouts in Current Subset
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Layout Number in Top Subset
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Number of Layouts in Top Subset
However, this information cannot currently be used as fields in Project Indexes.
It would be very useful to make Project Indexes much more aware of the Layout Book hierarchy, allowing users to include fields such as:
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Layout Number
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Number of Layouts
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Layout Number in Current Subset
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Number of Layouts in Current Subset
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Layout Number in Top Subset
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Number of Layouts in Top Subset
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Subset Name / ID
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Parent Subset Name / ID
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Grandparent Subset Name / ID
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Other levels of the Subset hierarchy
Ideally, the user could choose which level of the hierarchy should be displayed.
A broader rethink of Project Indexes
This could be part of a deeper improvement to Project Indexes, making them more flexible in how they navigate and present hierarchical information from the Layout Book.
Rather than treating a Layout mostly as an isolated item, the Index should be able to understand its position within the entire Subset hierarchy and expose information from any relevant level.
This would make it much easier to create automatically generated tables of contents, drawing lists, submission indexes and other documentation without having to rely on workarounds, manually duplicated information or different Master Layouts for different Subsets.
The information already exists in Archicad — the main improvement would be making it available and configurable within Project Indexes.
Submitted