Help:Twins

Revision as of 13:58, 26 May 2007 by Smelissali (Talk | contribs)

In the Registry, as in real life, twins have the same DNA but different names and properties. Twins are OK, and often valuable.

Also, as in real life, if you have the DNA of one twin, you have the DNA of the other twin.

There are some good reasons to have a twin:

  • The same DNA may serve more than one purpose.
  • The same DNA may be both a part, and documented as a part, and a device and documented as a device.


There are some poor reasons to have a twin:

  • The part designer did not notice that there was already an existing definition for a string of parts.

Twins and the Registry

The DNA Repository records the location of every part, so if one of the twins is available in the Repository, the user will be told about the twin in all searches. Also, the availability flag for twins will be set to available if the twin is available. This leads to the interesting situation where there are twins A and B. DNA of twin A is available but DNA of twin B is not. Requests for twin B are served by the DNA from twin A. If twin A is deleted by a user, twin B is still considered available and the DNA from twin A is used.

As always, to delete DNA, you must mark the well, plate, or tube containing the DNA as unavailable. -Randy