1.9 Inheritable and Composite Properties

Property inheritance is not currently implemented for CompositeProperty objects, in order to avoid confusion of the inheritance rules. Suppose a class exports a composite property A, which in turn exports an inheritable property B. Now suppose that A is an inheritable property with its mode is set to Inherited. Then the entire structure of A, including the value of B and its mode, is inherited, and it is no longer possible to independently set the value of B, even if its mode is Explicit.

However, the leaf nodes of a composite property tree certainly can be inherited. Suppose a class ThisHost exports properties width, order, and renderProps, and that the latter is a composite property exporting width, color, and size. The leafs nodes of the composite property tree exported by ThisHost are the properties

Each of these may be inheritable, although renderProps may not be.

It should be noted that all the leaves in a composite property tree are considered to be unique properties and do not affect each other with respect to inheritance, even if some of the subcomponent names are the same. For instance, in the above example, the properties width and renderProps.width are different; each may inherit, respectively, from occurrences of width and renderProps.width contained in ancestor nodes, but they do not affect each other. This is illustrated by Figure 1.2.

Also, if a CompositeProperty is set to null within a particular node, then the inheritance of its subproperties passes straight through that node as though the property was not defined there at all. For example, in Figure 1.2, renderProps is set to null in node C, and so renderProps.width in node F inherits its value directly from node A.

Composite property inheritance is fully supported if an inheritable property’s set accessor invokes PropertyUtils.updateCompositeProperty as shown in the code example at the end of Section 1.4.2.