Linking to a skill that hasn't been picked?
 

I want to be able to pick a "Specialization" and pull the name for the related "Skill" without having to pick the skill. Is there a way to do this?

If I use a linkage, the linkage throws an error if the specialization is picked without the skill.

I looked through the "Location, location, location" post, and I didn't see anything that looked relevant. Though, I could have easily missed it.

I could just add a literal value, but I want a way to avoid typos and to automatically adapt to changes (e.g. if I change the skill name later, or something like that).

Basically, I want to be able to pull the name of an unpicked skill by referencing its id.

Hmm... my gut feeling is that you're probably going to be best off adding all skills to the player, and then using a tag to track whether they've chosen it, and thus it shows up. That way, it's there for you to run the query against, but the player can still "pick" it.

I don't know enough details to recommend a solution. Without knowing what it means in this system to not have a skill, but to have one of its specializations, I don't know whether linkages are the best option for this. The first alternative I'd look at if they don't turn out to be needed is identifying the skills by tag, not by linkage.

FWIW, for the Specializations in Planet Mercenary, I tagged each of them with the relevant skill, primarily so that I could limit the list to the relevant skill (and do the math to ensure that they don't have more specializations than skill points). That said, everyone has every skill, so it's not a strict match to what you have.

If every character is considered to have all the skills anyway, then this is probably your best approach.

Otherwise, does the Specialization have the Skill.? tag for it’s parent? You might be able to do something like this then:
that way, I believe, mySkill will contain the name of the Specialization’s parent Skill