METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR COPYING OBJECTS IN AN OBJECT-ORIENTED ENVIRONMENT USING A MULTIPLE-TRANSACTION TECHNIQUE

摘要

A large number of objects, such as objects representing beams and columns in an object- oriented enterprise engineering system, may be copied in a model database by partitioning the objects according to certain criteria into a number of ordered small copy groups and copying the objects in each group as an atomic operation. Objects that are to be copied are organized into the ordered groups, and the groups are copied in order, such that all predecessors of a given object are copied into the database before, or in the same small operation as, the given object. If a large copy operation abnormally terminates before all the small copy operations have been completed, the model database is, nevertheless, left in a consistent state, and the copy operation may be resumed from the point of interruption. Furthermore, the number of objects that may be copied is not constrained by the amount of memory available in the system.