Tips for using inheritance strategies

The Mongoose framework has several levels of operation in which one level (or more) can "inherit" properties, characteristics, and attributes from higher levels. For example, IDO properties can inherit these settings from property classes; components can inherit from property classes, as well as component classes; and so on. The idea behind this architecture is to allow you, the developer, frequent opportunities for and levels of reuse, which makes it possible to develop more efficient applications.

The use of inheritance strategies provide a powerful facility for reducing the development effort and increasing the consistency of your application. We strongly recommend that you learn and use these strategies. If you use them consistently, you should rarely have to specify a data type, a format definition, or many other properties of a component.

Over time, you will no doubt develop your own additional inheritance strategies, but here are a few to get you started:

• Use SQL Server user-defined data types for your column definitions.
• In IDO development, establish IDO property attributes that are inherited effectively by many components without being overridden. You can set up IDO property classes to package default settings for property attributes. All IDO properties based on an IDO property class then inherit the class attributes.
• In form development, set up property class extensions only if you need them. If components bound to IDO properties commonly override the attributes of the IDO property and if the IDO property inherits from an IDO property class, you can set up a property class extension to standardize how these bound components override the IDO property class behavior. This practice, however, should be used sparingly.
• In form development, set up component classes to package the attributes of any type of component. Modifying a component class is a streamlined way of altering the behavior of any component that inherits from the class.