Feat: Alias Fallbacks

Looked through the docs, examples, and issues, but not seeing any feature for defining fallback values when aliases do not resolve. For example, in a multi-brand system, I would like to have global defaults for all possible brand tokens. Then a particular brand could override just the tokens needed.

Global:

{
  "color": {
    "error": {
      "value": "{color.brand.error.value || 'red'}"
    },
    "success": {
      "value": "{color.brand.error.success || 'green'}"
    }
  }
}

Brand One:

{
  "color": {
    "brand": {
      "success": {
        "value": "blue"
      }
    }
  }
}

This would alleviate the need for each brand to define all tokens, and instead define just the overrides. The syntax could also use a reserved key name like default (or DEFAULT, or VALUE) instead of an expression:

Global:

{
  "color": {
    "error": {
      "value": "{color.brand.error.value}",
      "default": "red"
    },
    "success": {
      "value": "{color.brand.error.success}",
      "default": "green"
    }
  }
}

[dbanksdesign]

I wrote up a quick example as well that hopefully helps…

https://github.com/dbanksdesign/style-dictionary-multi-brand-with-defaults

[chazzmoney]

Great question. I think that this can be done using the config.include parameter for your global (default) styles and the config.source parameter for your brand (overwrite) styles.

https://amzn.github.io/style-dictionary/#/config

Let me know if this helps, or if it doesn’t fit your use case.