helpers.adoc

Helpers

In addition to elements in scope, there are some helper methods that are always available in value blocks.

assembly	This will return the root group of the assembly the element is defined in.
root	This will return the root group of the 'top most' assembly being run. If only a single assembly is being run, this will be the same as assembly but if the element being run is in an assembly that has been mounted into another assembly, they will differ.
lookup(path)	This can be used to reference an element by a string path (using periods (.) to drill down into groups). If called directly it will lookup using the local scope. It is also available as a method on all groups, so assembly.lookup(path) would lookup an element starting from the root of the assembly.
lazy(path)	This works the same as lookup, but with an important difference: Instead of doing the lookup immediately, it will instead return a "proxy" object, which will do the lookup the first time a method is called on the proxy object, and then delegate all method calls to the actual element. This can be used to handle circular references in services.