inheritance

Inheritance is a primary benefit of object oriented technology. PRPC offers multiple types of inheritance that can maximize reuse of your rules while allowing localized overriding as appropriate. Also called polymorphism, inheritance allows a rule created for one class (possibly an abstract class) to be applied to other classes that inherit from it:

• Ruleset version inheritance works using three-level version numbers. For example, users who have a version 02-15-06 in their RuleSet list inherit rules in version 02-15-05, when no rule instance exists in 02-15-06.
• Ruleset inheritance arises through the order of ruleset names in the user's ruleset list. Rule instances in a ruleset at the top of the ruleset list supersede others of the same name.
• Organizational inheritance is implemented through a four-level assembly of privileges and RuleSet versions through the access group, organization unit, division, and organization.
• Class inheritance searches for rules from a concrete, lower class, up the class hierarchy to find available rules.

Class inheritance uses a sophisticated algorithm to find the parent classes of a specific class. Two types of class inheritance — directed inheritance and pattern inheritance — are available.

Class inheritance does not apply to external classes, even if the class name contains a dash character.

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