When going meta it is sometimes interesting to treat your system types as strings – and then be able to treat those strings as types again.

If you have a type you use the operator AsString to treat it as a string.

Until now there was no way to go from a string back to a type. Now there is : ClassFromString.

Consider this model:

I had the requirement to list all the subclasses except the purple ones…

I added a tagged value to the purple and then went like this:

ComponentSpecification.allSubClasses->select(x|x.ClassFromString.TaggedValue(‘TypeSort’)<>’SKIPTHIS’)

The  result is a collection of strings with the selected subclasses.