Comparison of Cloning Individual Objects and Whole Work Areas

Cloning object instances is different from cloning a whole Work Area in the following ways:

• Implicit Cloning of Mapped Table Instances. If you clone an individual executable object—Program, Load Set, Data Mart, Business Area, Report Set, or Workflow—that is mapped to one or more Table instances in the same Work Area, the Clone operation automatically clones the Table instance and the mapping as well.

  If you clone a whole Work Area, the system replaces any Table instances in the target Work Area that have been modified in the source Work Area since the last clone.

• Checks. When you clone a whole Work Area, the system duplicates the source Work Area, resulting in an identical target Work Area. Any object instances present in the target Work Area before the clone are either dropped or replaced, and objects that were not previously present are created.

  When you clone an object instance, the system does the following before performing the clone:

  • Checks Table instance origin during implicit clone. When you clone an individual Table instance implicitly by cloning an executable to which it is mapped, and a Table instance with the same name already exists in the target Work Area, the system checks to see if the Table instance in the target Work Area was already cloned from the same source Table instance or not. If it was, the clone proceeds without warning and replaces the Table instance. If the target Table instance was originally defined in the target Work Area, or if it was cloned or copied from a different Table instance, you receive a warning and cannot proceed with the Clone operation.

    Note:

    The system performs this check only when you clone a Table instance implicitly. If you explicitly select a Table instance for cloning, the system does not make this check: if a Table instance already exists in the target Work Area with the same name, the new Table instance replaces it, regardless of the target Table instance's origin.

    After you have cloned a Table instance from two different source Table instances, the system allows you to clone the Table instance implicitly as well as explicitly from either source.

  • Prevents multiple executables from writing to the same Table instance. When you clone an individual Table instance, either explicitly or implicitly when you clone a Program or Load Set instance to which it is mapped, the system does not allow the Clone operation to succeed if the result would be that two executables (Programs or Load Sets) wrote to the same target Table instance.

    When you clone a whole Work Area, this is not an issue because the system has already prevented multiple executables from writing to the same Table instance in the source Work Area.

• When you clone a whole Work Area, you must apply a label to the source and target Work Areas. However, when you clone an object, you cannot apply a clone label to the source and target objects.
• When you clone a whole Work Area you can update the Usage Intent of the target Work Area as part of the Clone operation.
• When you clone an individual object instance the source Work Area is not checked in as part of the cloning operation as it is when you clone a whole Work Area.
• When you clone an individual object instance you cannot create a new target Work Area as part of the cloning operation, as you can when you clone a whole Work Area and specify an Application Area as the target.