Aliases Management
Another new interesting feature in the program is the support of aliases. Aliases are used to convert information from one view to another. For example, the login of a user is converted into its full name with the help of the alias. Or, for example, paper orientation is converted from values 1 and 2 into the words Portrait and Landscape with the help of aliases as well.
The program is distributed with a ready set of aliases:
There are two types of aliases:
- Converters
- Value lists
Converters
Converters allow you to use small subroutines in the Pascal language to convert the source value into the one you need.
To do it, you should implement the function named Convert that gets the source string as its input and returns the string converted according to your idea.
For example, you can see in the picture above how to convert the initial paper size into a string with the “mm” characters at the end.
If several aliases use the same constants, variables and functions, you can group them into a special global module that is available for all active scripts.
Value lists
Value lists are used in case you need to convert some values known beforehand into other values known beforehand. For example, the example with the Orientation field converts the source value equal to 1 into the Portrait value, and the value equal to 2 into Landscape:
The list of values allows you to combine several source values into one group. It is convenient if you have several different values meaning the same.
In order to correctly interpret the source data, the value list has the Values type property that can take the following values:
- string
the source data are interpreted as is
- wildcard
the source value is interpreted as a string that may contain wildcards. It is possible to use the special characters * and ?
- regular expression
the source value is interpreted as a string that may contain Perl-style regular expressions
- custom function
the source value is interpreted as an expression in the Pascal language that should return True. This expression may contain the predefined variable Source initialized by the source value that is converted by this alias. Also, any functions that you define in the global module can be used in this expression.
Example:
The area an alias is applied to is defined by the type of the field it is used for. For example, the Paper Dimensions alias is used for all values of the Paper Width and Paper Length fields and the Orientation alias is used for all values of the Orientation field. That is, this parameter allows you to specify what values will be passed to the alias as its input.
Every alias can be linked to its parent alias that can be linked to another alias in its turn. In case there is a link to the parent alias, the source value will be passed to the parent alias first and the result of this conversion will be passed to the initial alias as the input value.
