Overview
Suppliers allow you to retrieve values about various objects by using a "prefix:key" syntax. For example
content:creator
This supplier retrieves the creator for the supplier object - a specific piece of content.
Suppliers include one or keys separated by a “>” operator. This is a more complex key chain and can be used to retrieve specific information from the supplier object. For example
content:creator>user:username
This supplier keychain retrieves the “username for the user” who is the “creator a specific piece of content”.
Typically, suppliers are used in the background by other macros. In particular, the macros in unnamed link make extensive use of them.
Supplier keychain in use
For example, on any given page, you can do this using the Report Info macro using the following
page:title
This uses the Page Supplier
It retrieves the title parameter, that returns the name of the current page
However, you can then use that value to return something else.
For example, if you wanted to know the number of characters in the page title, you can do the following
page:title>text:length
Each key has a prefix (e.g. page: and text:) and a key value (title and length).
In this case, the page: prefix belongs to the Page Supplier
titlekey that returns atextvalue, which is supported by the Text Supplier
The Text Supplier has a key value
length- that returns the number of characters in thetextvalue
This can be done indefinitely, chaining one value to the next.
If a null or blank value is returned at any point in the chain, the chain breaks and a blank value is returned.
Further details are in the Page Supplier documentation page.
In some cases the keychain may include the following syntax - %key:value% - these are injected parameters from a macro.
See also
Suppliers
Reporting app documentation