Counterintuitive copying

[xja]

OK, I'll bite.

First, I am confused by what you are asking for now. In your original example, you were talking about differentiating between children that were single-linked (has a "logical link" to only one parent) and multi-linked (has a "logical link" to more than one parent).

In the last post, you talk about differentiating between stored type (which means the info item contains the contents of a document) and linked types (which means the info item contains a URL attribute that references an external document such as a web page).

Currently, the Paste Special>Duplicate command does maintain the latter (ie, stored/linked status) of all children. With regard to the former (single/multi-linked), I do agree with you that there needs to be a way to specify whether children are duplicated or linked to when their parent is duplicated. I just disagree with how that should be determined.

Assuming that you ARE still referring to the single/multi-linked status, the current implementation may not have advantages in your example but it has advantages in other examples (see below). I think it should be maintained but the flexibility should be added that allows the user to have some children duplicated and some children linked when their parent is duplicated. That would address your situation.

Finally, since you asked (and to prevent Kinook from "fixing" something that isn't broken), here's an example (picture attached) where the current implementation is advantageous. Let's say I have an item called ProjectA. Linked to ProjectA, I have Task1 and Task2. I have a Text item (eg, a contract) called Contract that specifically contains language regarding ProjectA but is logically linked to both Task1 and Task2 (say, both Tasks have something to do with that contract). Now, let's say I have another project very similar to ProjectA so I want to duplicate ProjectA, which I do and then rename it to ProjectB. With the current method, both the Tasks and the Contract items would be duplicated. Then I could customize the Contract item under ProjectB to contain language specific to ProjectB without it affecting the Contract item in ProjectA. Note in the picture that I edited the name of the Contract under ProjectB and the Contract under ProjectA stayed the same.

With your proposed method, since the original Contract item was multi-linked to both Task1 and Task2 (and hence its icon showed the shortcut arrow), when I duplicated ProjectA (and its Tasks), the Contract linked to Task1 and Task2 in ProjectB would be the same item as the one linked to Task1 and Task2 in ProjectA. I couldn't edit it to contain language specific to ProjectB. So even though Contract in ProjectA is multi-linked, I still want it duplicated when I duplicate ProjectA.