Setting Attributes on a Component Reference

When you include another component, such as <lightning:button>, in a component, we call that a component reference to <lightning:button>. You can use <aura:set> to set an attribute on the component reference. For example, if your component includes a reference to <lightning:button>:

This is equivalent to:

The latter syntax without aura:set makes more sense in this simple example. You can also use this simpler syntax in component references to set values for attributes that are inherited from parent components.

aura:set is more useful when you want to set markup as the attribute value. For example, this sample specifies the markup for the else attribute in the aura:if tag.