Alembic Workbench User's Guide

6.4 Special Purpose Attribute Values

In order to allow for some tag attributes to be specified interactively, the Alembic Workbench has defined special-purpose processing for the following attribute values. In any of values that cause the user to be queried, the user may abort the creation of the tag by hitting either the backspace or the delete key.

attribute="#" or attribute="_GenerateUniqueInteger_"
If a tag preference entry has an attribute with one of these specified as its value, then every tag (element) instance generated interactively by the user will have this attribute value set to a unique integer. (Note that this is used to specify ID values in the special purpose COREF encodings generated by the Workbench.)

attribute="@" or attribute="_ExtractTextFromTag_"
An attribute value specified as this will cause the workbench to query the user to click on some tag somewhere in the document; then the text contents of this other tag will be used to fill the value of this attribute. (Note that this can be useful in specifying MIN attribute values for COREF tags.)

attribute="&" or attribute="_ExtractTextFromThisTag_"
This is similar to the previous attribute value processing, except that it defaults to picking the contents of the current tag (the one being created) to be the value of the specified attribute.

attribute="!" or attribute="_ExtractTextFromSelection_"
This, too, is similar to the "@" or "_ExtractTextFromTag_" attribute value above, except that instead of requiring that a tag already exist, it allows the user to create a tag "on the fly" from which to extract the needed text. (Note that this can be useful in specifying MIN attribute values for COREF tags.)

attribute="^" or attribute="_ExtractIDfromCOREF_"
This is a very special purpose attribute value that fills the value of an attribute with the value extracted from the ID attribute of another COREF tag, clicked on interactively by the user.

attribute="~" or attribute="_MakeCOREFandExtractID_"
Another COREF-specific attribute value that allows one to specify the extent of a coreferential expression that has not yet been tagged with a "COREF ID=\"#\"" tag. The user is queried to select the text to define the boundary of the initial mention expression, and then both the current COREF REF= tag is created, along with a COREF tag for the initial mention.

attribute="%" or attribute="_TypeInText_"
Creating a tag with this as one of the values of its attributes causes the Workbench to query the user for an arbitrary string to be included as the value of the specified attribute.

Other specialized attribute-specification mechanisms are planned for the future.

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