A TopicName is usually two or more capitalized words jammed together; the name identifies a WikiTopic on the Wiki.

OK, there's a bit more to it than that, but that's enough for most users most of the time.

Most of the time, you'll only see topic names in this simple form. There are some other things you might see (described below):

• free-links
• one-word topic names
• fully-qualified names
• versions

Free Links

If you want to force a word that wouldn't normally be a TopicName to be one, surround it with brackets. (e.g., [eHome] or [David Ornstein]). You are strongly encouraged not to do this, as it complicates what is supposed to be a simple process for creating web pages.

One Word Topic Names

Sometimes a topic needs to be a topic but it needs to have a one word name. For example, Persona might need to be the name of a topic. While you can always force this to be a link using a FreeLink, if this will be a common link, it's much more convenient to have FlexWiki do this for you. On the other hand, you don't want every capitalized word you have to turn into CreateATopicLinks: that'll just clutter your page.

To handle this, FlexWiki handles OneWordTopicNames in a special way: if a word is captialized and a topic exists for it, FlexWiki will automatically link to it. If not, it won't generate the CreateATopicLink. So, if you want OneWordTopicNames, create the topic first and your references will start auto-linking. A convenient way to create these is by typing in the name in the TopicBar. Oh, and don't forget they need to start with a capital letter.

Fully-Qualified Topic Names

From Build 1.8.0.1664 Onwards

A fully-qualified topic name has the form <namespace>.<topic>. For example, Microsoft.Projects.Wiki.AboutTopicNames. In this case, Microsoft.Projects.Wiki is the WikiNamespace and AboutTopicNames is the TopicName. It's very rare that you'll need this form. Almost its only use is for refering to a topic where the unqualified name would be ambiguous (i.e., when "the same" topic appears in two [visible] namespaces).

Read more at WikiFederationOverview.

Fully-qualified topic names for namespaces that do not exist are not rendered as links.

Versions

A topic name usually simply identifies the most recent version of a topic. However, you can make a topic name that refers to a specific version of a topic. This takes the form of topicName(version). For example: TopicName(2005-11-25-00-51-06.2187--60.26.37.124)

More Details

A few more gory details about TopicNames:

• TopicNames must start with an uppercase letter to auto-link (i.e. use PascalCase)
• You can have multiple capital letters in a TopicName; just be sure there's at least one lowercase letter or a digit
• TopicNames can optionally start with a single underscore

Using Brackets

If you want to violate some of these rules, you can use brackets to make a slightly larger set of strings into TopicNames.

Thus [eDocument] can be made into a topic name even though it doesn't meet the rules above for automatically recognizing topic names.

When you use brackets, you can have any mix of letters, digits and underscores in any order.

Limitations

There are severe limitations in the current build to making unorthodox topic titles, as illustrated above. See ExoticTopicFormats for limitations and work-arounds.