Design

Aliases

Simplify Carbone tag with aliases
COMMUNITY FEATURE Available for:
Carbone Cloud
Carbone On-premise
Embedded Carbone JS v2.0+

Alias

Aliases can be used to simplify the maintenance of your report by avoiding repetition of code, or to insert tags where special characters such as square brackets are not allowed (for example, worksheet names).

Write {#... = ...} to define an alias
Write {$...} to use this alias

Aliases can be defined anywhere in the document, at the end, or at the beginning. They are parsed and removed by Carbone before rendering.

data

{
  "name": "Cars",
  "wheels": 4
}

template

{#myAlias = d.wheels}{d.name} need {$myAlias} wheels!

result

Cars need 4 wheels!

Aliases do not store values. They are simply shortcuts. More information

Parametrized Alias

Aliases accept an unlimited number of parameters between parentheses, like a function in many languages. Each parameter must start by $.

data

[
  { "name": "chicken", "weekday": 1 },
  { "name": "fish"   , "weekday": 2 }
]

template

{#mealOf($weekday) = d[weekday = $weekday]}Tuesday, we eat {$mealOf(2).name}.

result

Tuesday, we eat fish.

More information

An alias cannot store a value. It is just a shortcut.

If you need to store a value, use the :set formatter:

{d.products[].price:aggSum:set(c.total)}
{c.value}

Aliases are replaced by Carbone with the actual tag before processing the template. They act as a preprocessor tool (similar to #define in C language).

For example:

Alias	Template	What Carbone Sees	Result
`d.obj`	`{d.val:mul($alias.qty)}`	`{d.val:mul(d.obj.qty)}`	OK
`d.arr[i].obj`	`{d.val:mul($alias.qty)}`	`{d.val:mul(d.arr[i].obj.qty)}`	Not supported

The second case is not supported because Carbone does not support starting a loop with d.arr[i].obj inside a formatter.