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Recursively Defined Elements

XML allows an element to be recursively defined, so that children of a given element are the same as the children of an ancestor element.

Recursion can be defined in the following ways (these are automatically determined when using the XSD or DTD (deprecated) import capability):
  • Use Children Of - You can set the Use Children Of property to specify the element whose children are to be used.

  • Inheritance - If some ancestor of the given element either directly inherits from a structure that contains the given element, or indirectly does so through an intermediate structure, the given element is treated as a recursive element. This is indicated in the element properties (when using the read only view) as Children not shown - recursive inheritance at link.

    By way of example, consider a Person structure that has an element for Department that inherits from the Department structure. The Department structure has an element called Manager that inherits from the Person structure. In this case, the Manager element is effectively recursively inheriting because there is an enclosing Person element that this is all part of.

Full support is provided for mapping recursive elements.

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