Bentley WaterGEMS CONNECT Edition Help

Dynamic Inheritance

Dynamic inheritance does not have a parallel in the genetic world. When a parent's characteristic is changed, existing children also reflect the change. Using the eye-color example, this would be the equivalent of the parent changing eye color from blue to brown and the children's eyes instantly inheriting the brown color also. Of course, if the child has already overridden a characteristic locally, as with the green lenses, his eyes will remain green until the lenses are removed. At this point, his eye color will revert to the inherited color, now brown.

This dynamic inheritance has remarkable benefits for applying wide-scale changes to a model, fixing an error, and so on. If rippling changes are not desired, the child can override all of the parent's values, or a copy of the parent can be made instead of a child.