Advanced features

This section presents solutions designed to help you write cleaner, more efficient scripts that can be immediately adapted to your target system.

Features summary

Control your system settings with environment variables — In addition to the local variables defined in a SIL™ program and issue variables (Variable Resolution), there are environment variables. These are global constants you can access in any SIL™ program using the silEnv function.
Make your scripts more readable with field aliases — Aliases represents a powerful tool to refer custom fields indirectly making your scripts function obvious.
Create dynamic content with SIL templates — The SIL Template Language allows you to quickly build large amounts of text, or HTML, using a template that can be populated using dynamic variables.
Store and reuse values with persistent variables — A persistent variable is a variable that continues to exist outside of the script execution.
Extend SIL with custom plugins — The SIL Engine library offers a suite of features that you can use to develop your own plugins based on Simple Issue Language (SIL). While SIL includes many built-in functions, you might need custom functionality for your specific use cases.