Designing the Procedure Logic › Copy with Substitution

Copy with Substitution

Copy With Substitution lets you copy an existing action block or event and substitute data during the copy. This capability saves time when you are completing similar actions on different data.

You can use Copy With Substitution when you want to select an event and copy that event either into the same procedure, another procedure in the same business system, or another procedure outside the same business system.

For many of the events (for example, the OPEN event), you will want to perform similar activities for all the list boxes. You can build a standard OPEN event, which other designers can copy and substitute their own data.

The action block Copy With Substitution works by performing the following tasks:

• Selecting an existing action block that references a single entity type
• Replacing the reference to that entity type and its attributes with another entity type of choice
• Creating a new action block

For example, consider an action block named Add Employee. Its logic may be quite similar to an existing action block called Add Customer. Using Copy With Substitution, you can request that an Add Employee action block be built from Add Customer, substituting references to Customer with references to Employee. It may be used on procedure or action blocks.

Copy With Substitution for an action block is presented as an alternative only when both of the following occur:

• The action block to be copied references entities of only one type.
• No relationships (except for ones involved with the entity type) are referenced in the action block.

Copy With Substitution has to make assumptions about the use of attributes. For this reason, you should check that the action block produced by Copy With Substitution really does what it should.