Inheritance in datasheets

Inheritance is an essential notion in the creation of a set of DS, to avoid repeating itself. This makes it possible to inherit characteristics of a parent DS, and even to rewrite on some, and even to make it possible not specifying “everything again” when we realize a set of DS have common characteristics.

For example, imagine an object my object that can have four characteristics A, B, C and D, having between 0 and 10 as values. One could have:

One sees that A, B and C are identical in the two different objects, one could thus simplify the task by making a parent DS:

Then we call it the other two:

In addition to not allowing repeating itself, it allows to pass on any change in a “parent” to all of his/her children.

One can nevertheless decide to specify a difference(with respect to the “parent”), which makes it possible to modify a common characteristic.

In DS, parenting is done through the call:

<PARENT Filename="xxxx.sitem"/>

It is advisable to organize the DS nomenclature in order to be able to identify it quickly, and also to quickly identify a parent of a complete card.. by doing it like this:

• Put an underscore “_” at the beginning of parents' names to make them come up first in a directory listing;
• Use underscores “_” for name fields, like for example the code shipped with RC.

This lets you know which parameters are populated and which ones are absent if the nomenclature is explicit.