property reference

A property reference is a notation for runtime reference to the name or value of a property that you can use in activities, data transforms, HTML, and other places. This notation is also sometimes called dot notation.

In rule forms, the information provided in the property reference together with other contextual information allows the system to identify a value on the clipboard.

The simplest form of a property reference is a dot (period) character followed by the property name, for properties of mode Single Value or Page. The page name is implicit from the situation and may be the primary page of an activity, the step page associated with a single row of an activity, or the class associated with an overall instance.

.Diameter

If the property has mode Value List or Value Group, follow the name with an index:

.myChild(4)
.StateCapital(Illinois)

The second common format involves a page name, the dot, and the property name. This is used only for top-level pages.

Customer.Zipcode

At runtime, the system can find the dictionary definition (the Rule-Obj-Property rule) of the Zip code property using "Zipcode" as the Property Name and the class of the Customer page as the Applies To key part.

Properties on embedded pages

Where the property is on an embedded page, which may itself be the value of a page mode property, and so on, more elaborate syntax is necessary. For example:

Mytoppage.myembeddedpage(4).mypageproperty.myproperty

Linked properties

Through the linked property feature, references of the format .AAAAA.RRRRR are valid, where AAAAA is the name of a linked property and RRRRR is a property reference for a property in the linked-to object. Linked properties are useful in harnesses, sections, and flow actions, and can reduce the need for activities in your application.

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