The Table of Contents (ToC) is typically only used in the Suitability Report and Review Report 2.0 report types. The rationale for this is that the three other report types are intended to be short and as a result, don’t usually need a ToC. Some users may of course want to add the the ToC anyway and this article will direct you how to do so.

A brief overview of report tags

Report items such as logos, headshots, tables, lists, contents of free-text boxes etc are all generated using ‘report tags’. For example, on the report title page, there’s a report tag called {logo} and (as you’ve probably guessed), when a report is generated, Genovo replaces the tag with your company logo, assuming you’ve uploaded one.

You can re-use report tags wherever you want in Genovo, so if for example, you wanted to include the name of the person that created the report as well as the name of the adviser on your report front page, you would include the {ReportCreatedBy} tag in your Report Title Page snippet.

As well as a Genovo matrix that lists all of the Genovo report tags, there’s also a great Knowledge Base article on how to use Report Content Manager to create customised versions of Genovo snippets, or even your own custom snippets. If you’d rather watch a video, there’s also a really informative nine-minute video tutorial which tells you everything you need to know.

Normal Genovo report tags have ‘squiggly brackets’ around them (they’re actually called braces) Anyway, above is an example of a Genovo report tag – this one lists all the objectives entered on the Client Objectives step of the Introduction section:

The Table of Contents report tag

OK – now that you're familiar with report tags, let's look at the Table of Contents snippet in a Suitability Report or Review report 2.0. You may have noticed that there’s also a report tag for the ToC, but it looks different to all the other tags. As you can see, it isn’t surrounded by braces, but two vertical bars on each side of the ‘TOC’ text (these have several names - commonly called pipe, vbar, or stick) but despite their unique look, the pipes function in the same way as braces.

How do I use the ToC tags

There are two methods – ‘quick & easy’ or ‘properly’.

Note that the ‘properly’ method requires the use of Report Section Manager, which is only included as standard for Company Plan Midi and above. If your Genovo account is a Solo, Company Starter or Company Mini, you have a couple of choices. You can either subscribe to Report Section Manager as a bolt-on extra, or you can request that we create the custom section for you for a modest fee.

Quick & easy

Let’s do the quick & easy first, as we expect this is how most people will do it. This method ‘piggy-backs’ the table of contents onto the Report Title Page by adding a custom snippet to the Title Page snippet. Here’s how:

1) Using Report Content Manager, locate the Report Title Page section for the report type you want to add a ToC to.

2) Create a custom snippet, by clicking the Add custom snippet button

3) In the text box, do the following:

d. The alternative to steps a. and b. above is to click on the Source icon  and paste the following HTML into the text box

Properly

The disadvantage of the ‘quick & easy’ method above is that it doesn’t create a dedicated Table of Contents section in the report, which means that it doesn’t appear in the Report Builder as a section (which in turn means that there’s no ability to exclude it from a report if you don’t want it). So – if you want the Table of Contents to behave exactly as it does in Suitability Report and Review, this is what you need to do:

1) Using Report Section Manager, create a custom section called Table of Contents and make it available to one or more of the report types you want it to appear in. Don’t add it to Suitability Report or Review Report 2.0, as you’ll duplicate the existing ToC. Make sure you select ‘Automatically included in report’. This Knowledge Base article explains everything you need to know about creating custom sections, or you can watch this video tutorial.

2) Next, use Report Content Manager to edit the ‘Title & Content’ snippet. You’ll only need the header text and the ||TOC|| report tag (you don’t need the page breaks)

3) Custom sections are always added at the bottom of the list of sections – clearly the wrong place for a table of contents! If your Genovo plan is a Company Maxi, we’ll move the new section for you at no cost, but for other plans we reserve the right to make a modest charge.