| To use an element structure |  |
| You can define a parent-child relationship between any two elements in your project. The parent element is at a higher level than the child. Parent-child relationships can be one-to-one or one-to-many. On the basis of parent-child relationships, you can create a multi-level, tree-like hierarchy of elements. Typically, many elements in the hierarchy act both as parents (to lower-level elements) and as children (to higher-level ones). You can enter budget lines only for elements that are part of the element hierarchy. Child elements and frequency You can define a one-to-many parent-child relationship where the parent contains the same child a number of times. In a construction project, for example, you might create a parent element called Heating to contain (say) 40 occurrences of a child element called Radiator. You do so by specifying a frequency of 40 when defining the parent-child relationship between the two elements. Header elements In your element hierarchy, you may want to include some elements whose only role is to provide a grouping structure for child elements at lower levels. For this purpose, you can create a special type of element - a header element - with the Layouts for Extra Elements (tpptc1101m000) session. A header element contains only a code, description and search key. You cannot enter budget lines for a header element. The top element This is the term applied to the element at the highest level in an element structure. For any one project, you could create several sets of element structures, whose elements are unrelated to one another. You specify which element structure you want to use for the project by specifying its top element in the Budget Top Element field of the project definition with the Project (tppdm6100s000) session you cab also define multiple tops. Progress and cost recording The ability to create a multi-level hierarchy has two important results: Progress information can accumulate from an element at a lower level to an element at a higher level. Actual cost information can accumulate from an element at a lower level to an element at a higher level. Related topics To use costs To use elements To use progress recording |