ENL - Handling Parent, Child, Sibling and Linked Objects

• Parent Objects
  
  Parent Objects are objects which point to at least one Child Object. In this example the object PBEXBM.PBL is the Parent Object to object BENCHMARK. The folder icons are not objects in this example, they simply store the various types of Child Objects that an object may have.

• Child Objects

  Child Objects are objects which point to a Parent Object. In the example above, the object BENCHMARK is a Child Object (of the object PBEXBM.PBL).

• Sibling Objects

  

  Sibling Objects are objects that have the same Parent Object. In the example above, the objects D_SALES_ORDERS, D_BENCHMARK and BENCHMARK (even if it is a different type of object) are all Sibling Objects because they have the same Parent Object (PBEXBM.PBL). Their status as Sibling Objects is only between objects of similar types, i.e. the object D_BENCHMARK is a sibling of D_SALES_ORDERS.

• Linked Objects

  Linked Objects are objects that are (as the name suggests) linked to another object, whether calling or being called. This is displayed in the Graphical View as a solid red line, a dashed red line (an Escalated Link) or a light pink line (Belongs To link for child and parent objects).

1. First select the object in the Graphical View, then click the Explore menu located on the toolbar.
2. Move the mouse pointer down to any of the options at the bottom of the drop down menu. If the options are gray, this means that there are none of these objects available for the object you have selected in the Graphical View. 
3. Select the option you require and all the corresponding objects (whether parent, sibling or child as you require) will be selected - i.e. a selection box will appear around them. See the example below for more details.

In the example below, a Select Child Objects operation has been carried out.

In the first view, an object has been selected, then the Explore menu is clicked and the Select Child Objects option chosen from the drop down menu. You can see the result in view 2 below. All the objects that are children of the object selected in the left hand image are highlighted.

This enables you to view, at a glance, any type of objects linked with an object you choose. Of course, this type of procedure comes into its own when you have a large number of objects in the Graphical View.

View 1

View 2

This application offers several Select options, all available from the Explore menu located on the toolbar, or from the Graphical View shortcut menu:

You can: 

• Select Linked Objects
• Select Child Objects
• Select Sibling Objects - this operation only highlights direct sibling objects, i.e. not any child/parent/sibling objects of the directly linked sibling object.
• Add/Select Parent Objects

You can also:

• Delete Siblings.
  
  When deleting Sibling Objects, all child object of the sibling objects are ALSO deleted from the Graphical View.

All these options function in exactly the same way as the Select Linked Objects function described above. The Add/Select Parent Objects function will also Add the object's Parent Object to the Graphical View if it is not already displayed there.