‘Extras’ ‘List of Placeholders’

This list is used to manage placeholders and to configure them:

Primarily you use the list when configuring a visualization object, which later should be inserted, which means instanced, in other visualization(s). For this reason you will use placeholders instead of or additionally to variables and strings in the configuration dialogs. You can open the dialog ‘Placeholders’ by the command ‘List of Placeholders’ in the ‘Extras’ menu or in the context menu.

Column ‘Placeholder’ will list all placeholders, which are currently used in the configuration of the visualization object. Column ‘Element number’ shows the elements which contain a placeholder. In column ‘Replacements’ you can enter one or several strings (text, variable, expression) which you want to get available later when replacing a placeholder during the configuration of an instance of the visualization object. The elements of the selection must be entered separated by commas. If no or an impossible replacement string is specified, then the placeholder can be replaced with any desired text later during the configuration of the visualization’s reference.

Later you use the list of placeholders when configuring an instance of the above mentioned visualization object, that means after this object has been inserted (as a ‘reference’) in another visualization by the command ‘Insert’ ‘Visualization’. For this purpose do the following to open the dialog: Select the inserted visualization, execute command ‘Extras’ ‘Configure’ and press button ‘Placeholders’ in Category ‘Visualization’. In this case the dialog will only contain two columns:

Column ‘Placeholder’ – like described above – shows all placeholders which have been defined for the primary visualization object. If additionally a selection of possible replacements had been defined, this list will now be available in column ‘Replacement’. Select one of the entries to replace the placeholder in the present instance. If no replacements have been pre-defined then you can manually enter an expression or variable. For this purpose perform a mouse-click on the field in column Replacement to open an editor field.