Use Parent

Sometimes a user-definable setting (see Making Changes in Actinic) within Actinic says 'Use Parent'. This means the value for this setting has been set somewhere else higher up in the store structure.

The following diagram shows which things are higher up in the store structure, and which things are further down.

'Variable Properties' is right at the top because it is possible to assign a store-wide default value when you create or edit a user-defined variable. For details on editing or creating a user-defined setting, go to Adding A New Variable.

As you can see, a setting value set in 'Site Options' can be used by any item in your Actinic store. Conversely, a choice can inherit a value for a user-defined setting from an attribute, component, product, section or from Site Options.

For example, one of the user-definable settings in Actinic is the 'Product Layout'.  You can set the default layout for your products within Site Options within the 'Layout' tab.

Every product that has 'Use Parent' in the 'Product Layout' field will use this layout.

But then you can override this default layout within a product, by selecting something other than 'Use Parent', and it will no longer inherit the layout from Site Options.

Furthermore, you can also set the value for the 'product layout' at the section level - so a whole section of products can use a different product layout than the default.

In order to make a user-defined setting editable in a particular place in your store, or to stop a setting being editable, you need to edit the properties of the variable that controls the setting. For details about this, see Editing Existing Variables In Actinic.

Where is the 'Parent' Value Coming From?

If you are looking at a grid of user-defined settings, and you want to find out where a particular value is coming from, simply click on the value in the grid. Underneath the grid, you will see the following details:

This information gives you:

·      A description of the setting (i.e. what it does)

·      The current value, and where the value comes from (if the field is set to 'Use Parent')

·      The name of the variable that control the setting. This is useful if you want to look it up in the 'library' (see Library 'Variables' Tab)