Cloning Work Areas

You can use the cloning operation together with the Usage Intent Work Area attribute and object validation statuses (Development, Quality Control, Production, and Retired) to create clean, controlled, distinct environments for application development, testing, and production. See Work Area Usage Intent and Validation Status.

The cloning operation is similar to the copy operation except that it is possible to clone a Work Area onto an existing Work Area, so that the clone overwrites the existing Work Area. For example, if you already have a Quality Control usage intent Work Area, and several objects fail quality control testing, you can fix the objects in the Development Work Area and then clone the whole Development Work Area onto the QC Work Area, creating a new version of the QC Work Area.

When you clone a Work Area, you add the same label to the source and target Work Area. The label is proof that the two Work Areas are identical. In addition, all the object instances in the Work Area are duplicated exactly in the target Work Area. Their validation statuses remain the same.