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OpenOffice.org annoyance: Cross references

I really like OpenOffice.org. Until now, it satisfied any of my needs quite fine. But since I am writing a book using OpenOffice.org, I found some really annoying stuff. Most annoying by now, is the problem of cross references. It happens almost in every text section, that I need to add a reference to another section of the book. For example, while writing about securing user data I want to point to the section of a database chapter, where prevention of SQL injection is explained. I basically want to add a reference like 'See section X.Y.Z, "SQL injection"'.

Just adding a simple reference, which points to another headline of the same document and automatically gets updated if the headline text or number changes, is already a pain in OpenOffice.org. Headlines are not referenceable by default, which means, that you manually need to add a reference target to each of the headlines you want to reference. If you did so, you can make openoffice insert a reference to this target.

At this point the next issue comes into place: OpenOffice.org only allows to use a very limited set of formatings for the reference to be displayed. While you can use the chapter number as a reference, it seems not to be possible to use the headline text in addition or to create your own format, like I need it. Therefore, the basic reference handling of OpenOffice.org is kinda useless for me.

Searching the web left me with 2 solutions: a) Wait for OpenOffice.org 3.0, where enhanced reference handling planned as part of the bibliographic enhancements. Sure, I just need to postpone my project for some years... b) Make use of a custom macro. The latter solution sounds much more practical to me. While I first thought this problem must be very common for authors, Google tought me the opposite. So far I only found 1 macro (see OutlineCrossRef3.sxw), which was written in 2003 and last updated in 2004. The macro at least solves parts of my problems: It provides a list of all headings in a document and, on demand, creates a reference target to one of them and inserts a reference at the current cursor position. Still remaining here: The formatting functionality does not satisfy my needs. You can specify some characters to be placed between different parts of the reference (like between the headline number and text), but still no real custom format.

I'm quite shocked that this feature, for me absolutly essentiell for writing larger documents, is almost not realized in OpenOffice.org. Or did I miss something? Is there anyone out there, who solved the issues? Or do I really have to dig into a macro language of OpenOffice.org and implement the feature on my own? Any hint welcome! Thanks in advance!