Pattern inheritance basically means inheritance of rules based on the name of the class. For example, if your class name is SAE-HRServices-Work-Candidate, then your parent class will be SAE-HRServices-Work. Any rules created in the parent class will be inherited by the Candidate class. And you continue to work your way up. Each "-" delineante a "parent".

Each class you create will also need to inherit from a specific class, i.e. parent. As opposed to pattern inherited parent (which you cannot chose, as the parent is already decided depending on the name of the class), you can choose the parent of your directly inherited class.

So, if you need to reuse rules from a certain class that is not found in the pattern inherited path, you can configure the class to directly inherit from the class that contain the reusable rules.

PATTERN INHERITANCE

• Determines which part of the organization owns an object. ( Rule- / Work- / Data- )
• Determines database operations at runtime + design time since it identifies the DB-Table of a concrete class.
• Rule lookup begins here

DIRECT INHERITANCE

• Determines the behavior of an object. ( Rule- / Work- / Data- )
• Determines what rules are acquired from EnterpriseFW / SolutionsFW / PegaBase layers.
• Rule lookup resumes here if no suitable candidates are found in the pattern inheritance.

REFERENCE

https://pdn.pega.com/class-design-and-inheritance-webinar-follow-qa/class-design-and-inheritance-webinar-follow-qa

​Pega Academy > System Administration Specialist (7.1) > Database Architecture > Database Persistence