Chapter 5 Customizing Generation with GTL

GTL Variable Reference

Variables are qualified values enclosed in % characters and optionally preceded by formatting options. At evaluation-time, they are substituted by their corresponding value in the active translation scope.

A variable can be of the following types:

An attribute of an object
A member of a collection or an extended collection
A template
An environment variable

For example, the variable %Name% of an interface can be directly evaluated by a macro and replaced by the name of the interface in the generated file.

Case sensitivity
Be careful when using variable names as they are case sensitive. The variable name must have the first letter with an upper case, as in %Code%.

Variables syntax

The following variables are shown with their possible syntaxes:

variable-block:

%[.formatting-options:]variable%

variable

[outer-scope.][variable-object.][object-scope.]object-member
[outer-scope.][variable-object.][collection-scope.]collection-member
[outer-scope.]local-variable
[outer-scope.]global-variable

object-member:

volatile-attribute
property
[target-code::]extended-attribute
[target-code::][metaclass-name::]template-name[(parameter-list)]
[*]+local-value[(parameter-list)]

object-member-object =

objecttype-property
oid-valued-object-member
this

collection-member

First
IsEmpty
Count

collection-member-object =

First

local-variable

local-object
[*]local-value

global-variable

global-object
global-value
$environment variable

variable-object

global-object
local-object

outer-scope

[outer-scope.]Outer

object-scope

[object-scope.]object-member-object
collection-scope.collection-member-object

collection-scope

[object-scope.]collection
[object-scope.]semi-colon-terminated-oid-valued object-member

For more information on extended collections, see "Extended Collections (Profile)" in the Extending your Models with Profiles chapter.