Property AliasWhenVariantSourceUnchanged

AliasWhenVariantSourceUnchanged

Gets or initializes a value indicating whether a variant pipeline should produce an alias to its source variant when running the pipeline results in no changes to the source file. Default value is false.

Declaration

public bool AliasWhenVariantSourceUnchanged { get; init; }

Property Value

Type	Description
bool

Remarks

This property only applies to variant pipelines (the top-level pipeline passed to a variant-add method on FileRepo, or any nested entry in Variants). It has no effect on the main pipeline of a FileRepoTransaction add call; use ThrowWhenMainSourceUnchanged for that scenario.

When this property is true and no processor in the pipeline reports changes, no data file is stored for the variant. Instead, a zero-byte alias marker is written that transparently resolves to the variant's source on fetch operations. Nested variants of the aliased variant continue to run against the unchanged parent source.

This is useful for avoiding storing duplicate files. For example, a thumbnail variant pipeline that produces no changes when the source image is already small enough will store an alias to the source instead of an identical copy.