13. Building Applications : Copying Application Components : How Dependencies Are Handled
 
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How Dependencies Are Handled
This section describes how iiimport and iiexport handle the relationships between frames and dependent components when you copy a frame.
A frame in an ABF application is interconnected with other frames in the application. For example, a frame can call one or more child frames.
The parent/child structure of the target application can be different from the structure of the exporting application. For the frame to be consistent and usable after the frame is imported, the dependent components must reflect the structure of the target application.
The iiimport command does not change the following dependent components:
Child frames (unless specified explicitly)
If the frame is a parent frame in an ABF application, iiimport does not copy the child frames unless you explicitly specified the child frames to iiexport.
Global components (unless specified explicitly)
A frame can also be dependent on global components, that is, global constants, record types, global procedures, or global variables. For the frame to run correctly, those components must exist in the target application. When you copy a frame with iiexport and iiimport, global components are not automatically copied, even if the frame references them. To copy global components, you can specify them explicitly to iiexport.