| Using Variables | Object Shortcuts | |
Knowledge Builder Project applications, using more than a one Knowledge Module that are linked through "chaining", often need to share a number of objects.
Such objects could be created in one Knowledge Module and then copied to one or more other Knowledge Modules to share their design-time "definition". The draw back to this approach is that the maintenance of these duplicate objects has to be ensured by the developer, i.e. a change to a shared object in one Knowledge Module must be mirrored in all the other Knowledge Module where it is used, through a manual process of re-copying. This drawback can be avoided by using object "Shortcuts", which enable a shared object to be defined in one Knowledge Module and the "shortcut" to that object to be defined in any number of Knowledge Modules.
Such Objects often also require the sharing of their values at runtime. Note that The JavaScript deployment engine automatically shares the runtime values of all Shortcut Objects and Objects with the same name.
For other deployment methods, the "Global Runtime Value" status of a Shortcut can be set to indicate that the values of such objects are shared across Chained Knowledge Module by right-clicking on the shortcut itself and selecting the 'Toggle Global Runtime Value' option.
Alternatively the "Global Runtime Value" status of all shortcuts from a given object can be set by right-clicking on the object itself and selecting the 'Global Runtime Value' option.
An alternative (legacy) approach to sharing Object runtime values across Knowledge Modules is to include such Objects in the list of "Exposed Objects" for these Knowledge Modules, so that their runtime values are shared. This approach is not recommended from release 9, as it is not supported by new deployment methods.
Changing an Object into a Shortcut from another Knowledge Module