Allow Containment across Area/Object boundary

Besides derivation there are three other parent-child relationships in System Platform:

• Host refers to the parent of an object in Deployment view and indicates where an object executes

• Container refers to the parent of an object in Model view

  • with one exception: whenever the parent is an area and the child is not an area - then the container is not defined

• Area refers to a combination of these two things

  • For a User Defined Objects it is the host

  • For all other objects (Area, DI objects, Engines, platforms etc.) it is the container

This is also the situation for relative referencing. In Model view, every parent can reference its own children except if the parent is an area and the child is not!

This exception to the rule for container causes confusion and inconvenience when working with context aware objects or graphics.

For this reason it is requested that the Container aspect of model view be honoured in both directions across an area.

The reasoning is: In the the model view, containers can be either object or areas, therefore:

• An object directly under an area should be able to reference that area as mycontainer

• If an object is directly under an area in the model view, the object's Container attribute should reflect the area as its container.

• Objects directly under an area should also have a contained name

• An Area should be able to reference contained objects (in the model view) using relative referencing such as me.containedobject.attribute.

The above described relationships should be usable in runtime as well as in design-time.

Additionally, it would be nice if it was possible to create hybrid Area/Object contained structures in the template toolbox