3.4 Inheritance

Lectora Training Plan: Everything You Need to Know

Before you get started with course development in Lectora it’s important to know more about the inheritance.  

Inheritance is the concept that objects can be included or excluded at a certain level within a project.

The levels of your Lectora project, include the project itself and all chapters, sections and pages within the project.

Each level of your project allows you to include objects in one Parent location that then get applied to all levels below it.

Objects placed at the project level will appear on all chapters, sections and pages in the project. 

While objects placed at the chapter or section level will only appear on pages in that chapter or section.

And objects that are placed on a page will only appear on that specific page

Let’s look at Inheritance in action. 

Here in my project at the project level I have added my header and navigation elements. Because these objects are at the highest level in the project explorer they will carry down and be repeated throughout each page of the project.

Likewise, I want this image to appear on each page of this chapter.  To do so, I will place it at the top of the chapter in the project explorer. 

It now appears throughout the entire chapter.

Now let’s talk about adjusting the inheritance of objects on a specific page. 

Let’s go back to the first page of my project. I don’t need to include the back navigation on this page, since there’s no page to go back to. 

Here’s  how I can adjust this, without affecting the back navigation on any other page.

Select the page in the project explorer and then navigate to its properties tab.

Now, select inherit options.

In the dialog window I can tell Lectora I want the page to either inherit All, None, or Specific objects from the parent. 

Remember the parent referenced here is either the project, chapter or section this page belongs to.

In this case, I’ll select Specific objects from the parent. 

Now, I’ll select the back button from the list of objects currently inherited and move it to the excluded list by selecting the right arrow button.

If I accidentally move something by mistake or need to change an object's inheritance later, I can always move it back by selecting the left arrow button.

Once I’ve  finished I’ll select Okay, and the object will no longer appear on this page.

One last thing to remember.

Be careful when you select an inherited object on a page. Although you selected that object on a particular page, you will be navigated to the level where that object exists in the project explorer. Any changes you make to that object will affect it everywhere it is inherited.