Field inheritance is a powerful way to manage shared and type-specific fields with a minimum of duplication and administrative overhead. Some fields, like Name, Title, and Document Number, are universal and apply to all documents. Other fields only make sense for particular document types. For example, MLR Approval Type only applies to a Promotional Piece document that goes through a Medical Legal Regulatory review.
The general concept of field inheritance is to use the document type tree structure as a way of specifying the scope of where a document field applies. “Field inheritance” is the implied cascading application of the field from nodes of the tree structure to its children nodes:
- Fields defined at the Base Document level apply to all documents.
- Fields defined at the Type level apply to documents of that specific document type and all of its subtypes and classifications.
- Fields defined at the Subtype level apply to documents of that subtype and all of its classifications.
- Fields defined at the Classification level apply to documents of that specific classification only.
The fields of a particular document are a composite of the fields defined for Base Document, Type, Subtype, and Classification.