Experimental samples with parent/child relationship: Inherit properties?

Data Management
1

Dear all,

(I hope this is the right section).
We have samples (e.g. a physical piece of steel) that was created from a parent sample. This can be modelled nicely with the parent/child relationship.

However, we describe the material according to some properties, some of which will not change if we cut the original sample into several others (e.g. the material composition in terms of elements, their relative fraction, etc), others will (like the physical dimensions of the samples)

I was wondering if the “child” sample could sort of “inherit” some properties (that will not change) or pre-fill everything from a parent and (not write protected) the user can update the fields as needed
Or maybe there is a better way to handle this? Ideally it would be nice to avoid the same information for the child again, which may also be a source of errors in the entered data?

many thanks
Ulrich

2

Dear Ulrich,
there is no inheritance from parents to children.
One way of doing this would be to have two separate object types, one for the parents and one for the children. In the object type for the children you can define some dynamic properties that get their values from the parents, so they would be automatically filled in.