Editing annotations on linked child documents

6.2.1 Editing annotations on linked child documents

Annotations on actively linked child documents can be added, deleted or edited without breaking links to the parent document. However, there are some limitations to this:

If residues in the parent document are modiﬁed in a way that makes it unclear where the annotations belong on the child document they might disappear (e.g. the residues in the parent document are deleted and the changes are propagated to the child).
If an annotation is deleted from a child document then the same annotation is modiﬁed on the parent document, the annotation will reappear on the child document.
An annotation which is deleted from a child will remain deleted on the child if the parent annotation is deleted and an identical annotation recreated on the parent.
An annotation which is edited on a child and then edited on a parent, will diverge into two separate annotations.

If you try to add, delete or edit an annotation on a child document, you will be warned that you must choose whether to keep links, deactivate links or save a copy to keep your changes (Figure 6.6 ).

Figure 6.6: Making annotation modiﬁcations to a descendant document

If you choose to Continue Annotation Editing and then save your changes to the child document you will be asked whether you want to keep the links active, deactivate the links or save a copy without the parents (Figure 6.7 ).

Figure 6.7: Saving annotation modiﬁcations to a descendant document

Keep active links to parents will allow you to maintain the lineage, but you might lose the annotations on your child document if the parent document is edited in a way that causes the annotation on the child to become unclear, as explained above. An active link note (as shown below) will be added to any annotation added or edited on a child document that retains the active link to its parent.

Deactivate links to parents will save the annotation changes to your child document, but will deactivate the links to the parent so that any changes you make to parent documents will no longer be propagated to the child.

Save as copy without parents will preserve the original ﬁle with the links to the parents. The original linked ﬁle will not contain your edited annotations if you choose this option, but the saved copy will bear your annotation modiﬁcations and will no longer be linked to the parent document.