class inheritance
A class contains rules which define the behavior of your application, whereas class inheritance allows your application to reuse the existing rules for other cases or applications. Rule reuse reduces development and testing time without sacrificing application quality. Thanks to inheritance, a child class can use all of the rules defined for a parent class. The system supports two types of class inheritance: directed inheritance and pattern inheritance. Pattern inheritance allows you to reuse rules within a single application only, whereas directed inheritance allows you to reuse rules in other applications. For example, you design a banking application that contains two divisions: Customer Support and Business. The divisions can use pattern inheritance to share rules related to the customer data because they belong to one organization. In turn, two separate applications that require to share the customer data can only use directed inheritance.