November, 1994 - Vol. 1 No. 11
In the accompanying article, Borland C++ 4.0 IDE - Dumping code into source pools we show how you can put
a group of source files together in a source pool and then use
the source pool in target nodes for that same project. To use
a node in another part of the project, you have two options: create
the node a second time or make a reference copy of the node. Here,
we'll take a closer look at what reference copies are and
what you can do with them.
When you create a reference copy of a node in a project and place the copy under a different parent node, the original node will appear to be a child of the node that holds the copy. Whatever settings you've applied to the original node will appear as the initial settings of the reference copy.
However, if you make changes to a reference copy (except for the node's name and description attributes), the changes won't appear in the original node. For example, if you've set build options for the node you copy, those options will be the same when you check them in the reference copy. However, you can change the build options for the reference copy (possibly resetting some of the settings you applied to the original) without affecting the settings of the original node or any other references to that node.
Likewise, after you've created a reference copy of a node,
you can change the settings of the original node without affecting
the reference copy. If you make additional reference copies, though,
each new copy will use the current settings of the original node.
If you create a reference copy of a source pool node, the rules change slightly. You can still change the settings of either the original node or the reference copy independently, but you can't change the content of a source pool independently.
Any changes you make to the content of a source pool will appear
immediately in any reference copies of that source pool. You can
add real nodes (nodes with boldfaced names) to a reference copy
of a source pool and then delete them, but you can't add
or delete reference nodes. (The online help appears to be in error
about this.)
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