Resolve name for descendant of instantiated virtual control?

[tgolsson]

Hello,

I am developing a unit frame addon, and am having some struggles with lacking documentation. I have a UnitFrame template which I want to dynamically populate with data, and I can spawn these using CreateControl, as in my example.

<GuiXml> 
    <TopLevelControl name="UnitFrame" hidden="false" virtual="true">
    <Controls>
        <Label name="$(parent)Name" text="Hello!" />
    </Controls>
</GuiXml>

Controls[0] = CreateControlFromVirtual("Target", GuiRoot, "UnitFrame")  
TargetName:SetText("Bob")

Now, for the party and raid frames I need to do this for group1...group24, and at that point it becomes quite awkward. What I'd like to do is something like

Controls[unitTag].Name:SetText("Bob")

, but I can't find any way to do this. Surely this must be doable without using massive if-statements?

I have considered creating one list for each element I may need to access, so I could have

self.ControlsName = { 
    [group1] = Group1Name, 
    [group2] = Group2Name,
    -- ...
}
 
self.ControlsHealthBar = { 
    [group1] = Group1HealthBar, 
    [group2] = Group2HealthBar,
    -- ...
}

But this becomes quite verbose as well. Are there any options I am missing? I know about string evaluation/introspection, but I fear it might hurt performance a lot.