Shortcuts

Shortcuts can be considered as a private case of substitution strings, or an extension of them. Shortcuts are included in the Shared Components module, and they are defined as part of the User Interface section.

Shortcuts act in a similar manner to substitution strings special string notation, in this case, is an all capital letters string wrap in quotation mark ("), which is being replaced, by the APEX engine, with a content associated with it. However, shortcuts allow us a greater degree of flexibility than plain substitution strings with regard to their content options and its functionalities. When we are using substitution strings, the APEX engine replaces the substitution string with its exact content. While using shortcuts, the APEX engine can replace the shortcut with the products of its content (and not just the content itself) and it can also interact with the APEX built-in translation mechanism, which we'll address later in this chapter.

The following example will show...