Introduction
Cross references can be created manually in Lawmaker or automatically using ‘tag x-refs’. In both cases, Lawmaker will create a reference to the target provision so that if it were to change e.g. through renumbering, promotion, demotion or deletion, the system will detect these changes and either update reference to the changes or flag invalid reference.
Hints and tips
You can paste over an existing cross reference. Pasting will strip out the old cross reference mark up before inserting the new cross reference and its mark up
You need to use manual x-ref method for inserting x-refs in quoted structures (including amendments). 'Update x-ref' will work the same way though in amendments, amendment lists and quoted structures.
Tag x-ref relies on pattern recognition. These patterns will be continually refined in future releases, if the system is unable to identify a cross reference automatically, users have the option to insert a manually created cross reference instead
Only internal cross references will be created (where the target provision exists in the same document). Pattern recognition has been designed to identify cross references (textual amendments) to other documents (what we refer to as external cross references) but for now will just ignore them.
Tag-x-ref will not attempt to identify cross references that appear within quoted structures – including the introducing provision before the quoted structure (that is wrapped in the <mod> element)
You can use the manual paste method and ‘update x-refs’ to manage cross references within quoted structures
With exception to EU elements which haven’t been configured to work in cross referencing yet.
Don’t use ‘Paste’ from the right-click menus or upper toolbar as this uses a specific “paste special’ method that hasn’t been properly configured to work in our version of the application yet.
You can use the manual paste method to insert cross references to provision in other documents in the system. If you use ‘Update x-ref’ they will change from ‘Valid’ (orange text) to ‘Invalid’ (grey highlighted text) as the target provision doesn’t exist in the document you are updating. However, the link to the target provision will be preserved so if you were to paste your provision containing the cross reference back into the source document (e.g. by applying an amendment) and run ‘update x-ref’ again, the cross reference will change from ‘Invalid’ (grey highlighted text) to ‘Valid’ (orange text) as the target provision now exists in the same document as the cross reference. This will be useful when drafting a large bill in separate documents, but also when applying amendments to a bill.
If you want to change a J-ref and you are currently viewing J-refs in cross references, re-run ‘Update x-ref’ to see the J-ref updated.
SI/SSIs only
The system will determine whether a paragraph should be referred to as a “sub-paragraph” or “paragraph” depending on whether there is a Sub-paragraph (with the numbering (1)) in your target cross reference’s ancestry