> My first thought was that this problem could be solved by using > <wtkx:define>. Then I realized that there is no way to dereference the > defined object in a container. Currently the object can only be referenced in > an attribute. So there's something missing; a counterpart to <wtkx:define>. I > propose <wtkx:ref>.
I had a similar thought. This feature is currently being tracked in PIVOT-556: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PIVOT-556 I prefer the term "value" to "ref". "ref" implies that the tag represents a reference, whereas what it actually represents is the value pointed to by a reference. "deref" might be more accurate, but not very intuitive. :-)
