Asciidoctor :: Discussion - Re: Resetting nested attribute reference values

Re: Resetting nested attribute reference values

Posted by mojavelinux on Jan 25, 2019; 10:12am
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/Resetting-nested-attribute-reference-values-tp6690p6691.html

@trost,

By default, attribute values are not recomputed. Therefore, reassigning fruit has no affect on phrase because phrase has already been resolved.

I looked into deferring the resolution of the attribute references when defining the attribute. To do that, you would use:

:phrase: pass:c[{fruit} is a kind of fruit]

While that prevents the attribute reference from being resolved at assignment, there's no way in AsciiDoc to have it be resolved later (aside from writing an extension*). The problem is, when you reference {phrase}, it only resolves the value of phrase, not the attribute references it contains.

Unless there's something I'm not thinking of, I don't think there's a way to do what you want to do currently. AsciiDoc attributes weren't designed for that use case. We could consider a way to recursively resolve attribute references after Asciidoctor 2.0.0.

Cheers,

-Dan

You could write an inline macro extension called "resolve-deep" (e.g., resolve-deep:phrase[]) that resolves attribute references inside of an attribute value.

On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 4:51 PM trost [via Asciidoctor :: Discussion] <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello--

I am having trouble finding information about something you might call "nested references" in Asciidoc--i.e., a user attribute reference that points to a value that contains another user attribute reference. In particular, I want to be able to reset the value of the lower-level reference and then have that new value be rendered by the upper-level reference without having to also reset the value of the upper-level reference, if that makes sense.

To illustrate the problem, consider the following example:

:fruit: orange
:phrase: {fruit} is a kind of fruit.
{phrase}

In this simplistic example, Asciidoctor would render "orange is a kind of fruit".

But, if I wanted to reset the value of "fruit"...

:fruit: orange
:phrase: {fruit} is a kind of fruit.
:fruit: apple
{phrase}

...Asciidoctor will still render "orange is a kind of fruit". I want Asciidoctor to reset the value of "fruit" within the "phrase" value, without having to explicitly reset the "phrase" attribute after the "apple" line. Is that kind of functionality supported?

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Dan Allen | @mojavelinux | https://twitter.com/mojavelinux