Have you ever wanted to use a property from another type in your own schema? How about copying a bunch of properties from different types? With the latest release, there’s a new feature called delegated properties that lets you do just that. A delegated property is a property that works like a pointer or shortcut to another property.

Say for instance you’re creating a new type called ‘Irish actors’ and you want the properties ‘birthdate’ and ‘birthplace’ from the ‘person’ type and the ‘films’ property from ‘film actor.’ Instead of creating new properties that duplicate these existing ones, and having to repopulate their values, you can delegate these properties — which means you create a new type with new properties (that can have their own display names and display characteristics) that share the expected type and the data with the source properties.

This is a new feature and requires a little help to find your way through it, so let’s look at an example. You’d start by selecting a type, say ‘film actor,’ and adding columns for the properties you care about. You can then filter down by some criteria, such as ‘birthplace,’ and get a list of actors that might look like this.

The next step is to click the ‘use results’ button and select ‘add to another type.’ One option here is to quickly apply an existing type to these results, but we want to go one step further and create an entirely new type. By entering a type name and choosing ‘create new’ you now have the option to make a new type in any domain you administer.

This new type will come pre-populated with delegated properties for each of the columns appearing in your filtered set.

Voila, you’ve created a new type without ever setting foot in schema editor!

In the next release you’ll be able to create delegated properties directly in the schema editor as well, but hopefully this can get you started.