About schematic feature class inheritance

A schematic feature class can inherit another schematic feature class. This relationship must be specified at the creation of the child schematic feature class—that is, parent-child relations cannot be configured between two schematic feature classes that already exist. A child schematic feature class cannot have a type different from its parent schematic feature class—a node schematic feature can only inherit another node schematic feature class, a link schematic feature class can only inherit another link schematic feature class, and so on.

Creating a schematic feature class as a child of another schematic feature class can save configuration time, in particular when you create schematic feature classes whose schematic features are going to be managed by custom queries. Once it's created, a child schematic feature class automatically inherits the parameters configured on its parent schematic feature class, for example, the parent schematic attributes, the custom query, and the identifier that may have been configured on the parent.

The schematic feature class created in the schematic dataset also has the exact same structure as the parent schematic feature class. So any new configuration of the parent schematic feature class also automatically impacts its children schematic feature classes. On the other hand, the configuration of a child schematic feature class can evolve in a different way than its parent—for example, attributes, custom query, and identifiers that are automatically inherited from its parent can be reconfigured at the child schematic feature class level; new attributes can also be specially configured on the child schematic feature class if they are not required on the parent.

Legacy:

Prior to ArcGIS Schematics 10, symbology was configured at the element type level whatever the associated diagram type. This meant that an element type associated with two different diagram types implemented schematic elements that were displayed in the exact same way in both types of diagrams. Consequently, when you created a child element type, it automatically inherited the symbology configured for its parent by default. Within this version, where schematic elements display as schematic features, default layer properties can also be specified if you want the schematic features based on the same schematic feature class to always display in the same way in all diagrams based on a particular diagram template. But these default layer properties are configured at the diagram template level, not at the schematic feature class level. Consequently, when you create a child schematic feature class, it doesn't inherit any default layer properties.