Copy all configuration of Table Variant to main subject

Hi @kenterweeme,

Maybe I’m missing something here, but it seems to me that variants are being misused to implement changes to the main screen in a controlled manner. Why not create a feature branch instead? This way, you can directly modify the main screens in an isolated and controlled environment. Once the changes are approved by the key users, you can merge them back.

@Jeroen van den Belt Hi Jeroen. Yes this would be the preferred way of working. However your suggestion is from a new project point of view. Existing projects often have many of these "new default” variants already in place. A task like this could make converting it to a better standard a lot easier.

Hi Ken, 

If we want this to be a one-time action only, I think it would be more appropriate if you created a custom enrichment for this situation, as they are better suited for this purpose. 

I am personally a bit skeptical about adding a formal task for this, as it might sustain or even encourage this way of working. Therefore, I would prefer not to include this in the platform standard. Instead, it could be a suitable Thinkstore solution, which would allow it to be shared with those who need it.

However, I will still open up the idea for voting and discussion, as people might disagree with me. I can also understand that there could be other situations where a variant becomes the leading version and therefore may actually serve as the base.

I would like to see this in the variant where you can copy subject or variant from table to a view. It's not uncommon that a table grows with expression fields et cetera and you want to create a view for enhanced performance. Now you have to manually recreate.  Would be great if we can pick the main or variant as a template for the new view. 

And also the scenario where the main subject is fully altered and you want an extra variant. You then want to take the main subject and create a variant, whilst resetting the main subject to the defaults so the second variant will be able to work. 

@Jeroen van den Belt I agree with you that this could lead to the wrong way of working as a task. I didn’t think of an enrichment yet, that indeed feels more like the proper place to build this. 

I encountered a different application for this enrichment last week:

When gradually moving to Universal you can have both Windows and Universal running at the same time. Initially, using a variant for Universal would be fine, but after completely switching the screen over to Universal and turning it off in Windows, you want the Universal variant to become the Default subject.

The enrichment can in turn then also include a checkbox to delete the variant after copying it to the default.

@kenterweeme 

If you are going to work on this enrichtment, maybe also build the other way around:

Usecase: We have a screen with only the default (so no variants), connected to different lookup, details, task, report etc. But then we need the screen, in a variant on a different place, but this should be more “open” then the default subject we have now (show more columns for example).
With this we need to create a variant from the default subject and assign it on all the different places, it would be very usefull to have an enrichtment for that. So it would create a variant with the settings from the current default and assign the variant to lookup, references, menu items etc.