About inheritance

Subclasses inherit some or all of their properties from their parent class, which in turn might inherit some or all of its properties from its parent class. There is no functional limit to the number of levels of classes you can define.

Using Enterprise Manager, you can view and examine the properties of both the parent classes and the subclasses of a class. This view is generally available from the Properties tab of the Property sheet of both document class objects and document objects.

Changes to the parent class can be inherited by its subclasses and will be applied to new document versions that are based on that class or one of its subclasses. Existing document versions are not affected. See Editing a document class for a description of what happens to the document object's database table when you add or remove properties.

A subclass inherits properties and security settings from its parent class. You can change and add custom properties to the subclass as well as modify its security.

The root class for documents, the Document class, is created automatically during object store creation. After that, there is no limit to the number of subclasses or properties you can add to the object store. You can create a new document subclasses by running the Create a Class wizard from Enterprise Manager.

See Changing document class for more information.