aTbRef - new article on creating a user attribute

Tutorials and Examples
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I realised this aspect of adding something new wasn’t covered so there is now an article Creating a new user attribute.

The site index, zipped TBX etc. are all updated.

I also tweaked the quick links entries (just) for the fuzzy search page so there is a backlink to the site’s home page.

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(Sorry for putting it here, but the link from this post is what gave rise to my question).
In other “sibling” article ( Attribute Naming) there are two passages:

  • The first character must be a letter (upper or lower case) from the Roman alphabet, i.e. A to Z. It must not be a number or an underscore. The initial letter can be accented (bearing in mind that at a computer code level, accented letters are a different character) and may be a non-roman script character.
  • non-Roman alphabet Unicode characters may be used for all except the first character.

Is this still an actual requirement? I created many user attributes named only with cyrillic letters. All of them seem to work without any issues.

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Thanks for this. The referred-to page is Attribute Naming. It appears to have last been changed as at v9.1.0 (see).

It seems only the first bullet is wrong, as the second is not problematic (i.e. Cyrillic characters are allowed in characters after the first). This quick check confirms your report:

Document Inspector: untitled 2025-03-31 09-46-45
Document Inspector: untitled 2025-03-31 09-46-451038×514 108 KB

I made one attribute via the Document/User Inspector and one via the Displayed Attributes picker. FWIW, I copy/pasted the words as I’m not sure about how to type Cyrillic—but I don’t think the latter matters.

TBH, I’d have to check with @eastgate (who’s travelling ATM) re the fine detail before it makes sense to alter the existing doc. It sounds as though there has been a change missed in documentation. With such a broad feature set, small changes/fixes occur that don’t filter into RNs. Making is so the first letter can be non-Roman may be a side effect of parser improvements in b671 (so in public release v9.7.3) though there is no explicit mention of the change.

Possibly pertinent for @eastgate. In RNs, I think issue #2574 may be fixed. On the topic of use of Cyrillic (and other single-byte Non-Roman characters), it might also be worth checking the status of issues #3208 and #3402. This also begs the question of double-byte character languages and thie use in attribute names and export.

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