Now that citation names are more visible in RM8 and potentially of much more use, I think there should be more flexibility in the automatic generation of these names. I would welcome any comments on my thoughts on this before submitting this as an enhancement request.
I would like source templates to be extended to allow the citation name to be built in a similar way to the way the Footnote, Short Footnote and Bibliography are built today. That is, built from any mix of source fields and source detail fields using the Source Template Language. This would allow maximum flexibility in the creation of this name, allowing any mix of standard ‘boiler plate’ intermixed with variable data that is specific to either the (master) source or the specific citation.
All of the code to interpret the Source Template Language already exists, but clearly there would need to be code extensions to allow the format of the citation name to be specified in a source template and the additional call to dynamically build and display the citation name as the template is processed. I would have thought that this new processing for the citation name would only be invoked if the source template includes a format for the citation name, and otherwise the current method would be used to build the citation name from the source detail fields (citation details fields) in the citation field order specified in the template. This would ensure that no unexpected changes would occur to the existing format of citation names unless one were to deliberately modify a source template to specify the format of the citation name.
I would welcome any comments. Would it be of use to you?