Cloning records

When you clone a record, the new record page opens with all fields prepopulated with values from the original record. You can change field values or accept those from the original record. The original record is not affected when you create a cloned record. For some objects, it makes sense to clone related records when cloning a record. For example, when cloning a Purchase Order record that has relationships with Line Item records, it makes sense to clone all of its related line items. The following illustration shows a parent record with related records and shows how a cloned record can include cloned related records.

As the following screen shows, the object definition relationship component provides controls for cloning related records. In the example shown from a corporate room reservation system, when a new room becomes available it might be configured with a certain set of devices such as a projector, coffee maker, and whiteboard. When the user clones a particular room record, they want it to be populated with this set of devices. To enable that, you would check the second box, Clone all related Devices when any Room record is cloned.

With a Clone all related… flag checked, related records are cloned and attached to the resulting cloned records. If the new record page for an object contains a grid control and Clone all related… is checked, the grid control will be automatically pre-populated with information corresponding to the original related records.

As an alternative to the cloning mechanism, in the new record page you can use the lookup fields to attach existing related records. If the new record page for the object has a lookup field configured to explicitly select related records, this supersedes the Cloning Control settings in the relationship definition.