Understanding inheritance

One of the biggest time-saving features that the program offers is a concept called inheritance. This concept may not be natural to you, and it will very likely be the aspect of the program that requires the most thought when you are designing a new title. The scenario in which you’ll realize the greatest benefits from using inheritance is when you have an object or a group of common objects that need to appear on more than one page of your title.

A scenario

For instance, let’s imagine that your course will have a How to Sharpen a Pencil section with 10 pages in it, and you want the student to be able to traverse forward and backward through the pages by using a Next button and a Previous button. Furthermore, you always want a Glossary button to appear on each of those pages, so the student can quickly display a Glossary of terms when necessary. Suppose also that the last page of your How to Sharpen a Pencil section is the last page of the entire title. Since it is the last page of your title, it should not have a Next button.

Achieving the scenario without using inheritance

Traditionally, you would create ten new pages in the How to Sharpen a Pencil section. You would then import and place the Next, Previous and Glossary buttons on one of the pages, and make the Action of each button go specifically to the next page, the previous page, and the glossary respectively. Finally, you would copy and paste all three of the buttons on the remaining nine pages within the section (minus the Next button on the last page).

Achieving the scenario using inheritance

Alternatively, take advantage of the program’s inheritance feature. With inheritance, you can import and place those three buttons (Next, Previous, and Glossary) on the Section level object that you titled How to Sharpen a Pencil instead of placing them on all the pages.

You will place these three buttons on that Section one time, you will set the buttons actions one time, and then you will simply start creating new pages in that section. The inheritance feature enables those three buttons to automatically appear on every new page you create in the How to Sharpen a Pencil section! Anything you place on the section level will automatically appear on every page you create in that section.

You don’t always have to inherit everything

As mentioned above in the scenario, the last page should not have a Next button, since it is the last page of the title. By placing all three buttons on the Section, every page created in that Section contains all three buttons, which we know is not desirable on the last page.

To solve this problem, the program offers you the ability to exclude certain objects from being inherited. By using this feature, you can continue to inherit the three buttons throughout the section, while excluding the Next button from the last page.

Inheritance summary

Anything placed on a page appears on only that page
Anything placed on a section appears on every Page* of every sub-Section in that Section
Anything placed on a chapter appears on every Page* of every Section in that Chapter
Anything placed on a test appears on every Page* of every Section in that Test
Anything placed on your title appears on every Page* of every Section of every Chapter in that Title

*Unless you use the Exclude Inheritance of Certain Objects property on the page.