This is my week end project: a table of contents generator. Well, technically, it’s more like a two hour project interrupted four times over the course of a Saturday but I guess it still qualifies as a week end project.

I got tired of managing the table of contents of my documentations manually and in particular, of having to modify all the section numbers by hand whenever I moved things around. This short Javascript program now automatically takes care of it for me. Here is the quick documentation:

// A simple HTML "table of contents" generator.
//
// 1) Include toc.js in your HTML file:
//          <script type="text/javascript" src="toc.js"></script>
//
// 2) Call generateToc() in your onLoad() method:
//           <body onLoad="generateToc();">
//
// 3) Declare a div with the id "table-of-contents" where you want
// your table of contents:
//           <div id="table-of-contents"></div>
//
// 4) Put each of your sections in an <a> tag with class "section",
// specifying an "indent" representing the indentation of that section.
// Only the length of the indent matters, now its content. If no indent
// is found, a string of size 1 is the default.
//
// Example:
// <a class="section" name="Section 1">Section 1</a>
// <a class="section" indent=".." name="Section 1a">Section 1a</a>
// <a class="section" name="Section 2">Section 2</a>

This script now powers both testng.org and jcommander.org, go take a look there if you want to see what it looks like.

Ideas for potential improvements:

  • Make the numbering optional or configurable.
  • Have the script add CSS classes to the sections for easier styling (“section1”, “section2”, etc…), since the indenting is pretty crude right now.