The Glorious Simplicity of Structure Inheritance

When I first saw the words Parent Structure there, the following thoughts came to mind, in increasing order of coolness

1. All fields in the parent structure are inherited by the child structure
2. The idea of polymorphic content, i.e. content of one type (i.e. structure) Y that is a child of type X, is also of type X. This is in essence the IS-A relationship in object oriented programming.
3. Asset Publisher would respect above polymorphic behavior so I can simply query for content of the parent type and get back all content tied to that structure as well as all content tied to child structures.
4. The idea that a child structure would automatically be serviced by the CMS template that serves its parent.

If you guessed that all of that is true, then you would be… wrong. The only point that holds true is the first: a structure simply inherits the fields of its parent structure (if one is specified).

That’s it! Done!

Now, this sort of obviates the need for the rest of this post. But if you’re like me, you want to try stuff out and push the limits a bit to see how stringent things really are, and what the actual payoff is, in practice, of using parent structures. So that is what follows.

Read the rest at liferay.com.