Branching Classes

Branching of a class allows you to create a new singleton class for your appliance using an existing template class rather than creating the new appliance from scratch. This is especially useful when you want to add additional functionality to an existing class (e.g., upgrade to a newer version or provide additional parameterization capabilities).

See the Appliance Creation Guide for details on how to create a new singleton class.

You can branch a class by selecting the class instance that you wish to branch and right-click the mouse and select Branch Class from the context menu or click on the Appliance menu item and select the Branch Class option.

When the branch operation is started, the following dialog is displayed:

You may click on the Cancel button any time during the operation in order to cancel it. Clicking on the Help button displays this topic.

Progress is displayed showing the percentage completion for each volume that is copied. When the branch operation is completed, the following dialog is displayed.

Once you have created, configured, and tested the new singleton class you can then drag it into a global so that other applications may use the new class or you can drag it into the application's local catalog so that it may be instantiable by your application in the case where multiple instances of the class can be used in the application.

-- BeckyH - 27 May 2006