Data inheritance

With meta data inheritance it is possible for you to propagate meta data from a defined set of business module columns to lists on entity sites. This is especially useful for the end-user as it requires them to enter less data overall, as the system automatically fills certain fields.

This is useful if working in many different documents libraries, but information about the overall responsible person of the given entities is important.

When users of e.g. a Company module allow inheritance of meta data such as contact information or account numbers, this information can be inherited to any projects created as a child entity to the company.

There are currently no requirements for the utilization of this feature.

In this example, we will set up inheritance on the documents lists on Projects to show the Project Responsible person. Note, however, that inheritance can be done on multiple lists and with multiple fields.

In this example, we have a project called “Setup on Main Street” with a responsible person, Sam Wilson, set:

The Documents library on the project site, however, does not display this information:

We can set up inheritance from the WorkPoint Administration:

1. Click the “Home”-button of the solution.
2. Click the cog-icon to access the WorkPoint Administration.

3. Click the header of the business module for which data inheritance should be set up.
4. Click the “Inheritance”-menu item.

5. Click the enable inheritance. Inheritance jobs can, depending on the scale, be costly performance-wise, and there might also be other scenarios where inheritance should be temporarily disabled. This can be done simply by disabling inheritance here.

Once inheritance is enabled, the page displays further configuration options:

6. Click the enable “Inherit” for the Documents library.
7. Click the enable “On Entity Updated". This ensures that the inherited metadata is re-inherited if it changes on the source entity, e.g., if the Responsible person changes on the project, the new metadata will be inherited to the target documents and other elements.
8. In the "Folders & Document sets" column, we can select whether data should be inherited to folders and document sets. In this instance, we want folders and document sets to also get the inherited data, so we check the checkbox.
9. Click the empty field in the “Fields” to get a selection of fields that you can add. You can add multiple fields, but in this case, we just want to inherit the “Responsible” from the project to the list, thus “Responsible” is selected.
10. In the "Editable fields" we can select which of the inherited fields should be editable on the target elements.
11. Click the either the “Save”-button or the “Save and run inheritance”-button once the configuration is complete. In this case, we click the “Save and run inheritance”-button.

Depending on the amount of entities in the business module as well as how many fields to inherit, the inherit operation might take a while. WorkPoint displays this message:

If this is not an issue, click the “OK”-button to proceed. Otherwise, click the “Cancel”-button.

Also note that running data inheritance will overwrite any information currently in the fields to inherit. WorkPoint displays this message:

If this is again not an issue, simply click the “OK”-button to proceed. Otherwise, click the “Cancel”-button.

The “Log”-section of the page displays the progress of the inheritance job:

12. To update the list and follow the progress, click the “Refresh”-button.
13. You can stop the job prematurely by clicking the “Stop”-button in the log

Once the operation is complete, we can see that the project responsible person now shows in a column in the Documents lists:

This requires the enabling of the “Responsible”-column in the selected view of the Documents list.

In certain circumstances it may be wise to disable data inheritance temporarily. An example of this is during data migration. This can be done by simply going to the inheritance settings page for a given business module and disabling the setting. The configurations persist, and if re-enabled inheritance will work as prior to disabling it.

Also note that lookup fields with lookup values exceeding 225 characters inherited to document lists are converted into single line of text fields. This may cause issues so best practice is to limit this to less than 225 characters.