Collective Entries

Contents

• What is collective?
• Grouping entries
• Requiring same selection
• The dangers of Collective

What is Collective?

Collective Entries exibit two main behaviours:

1. If all of an entry's children are collective, then they will all group together into a single item on the roster.
2. The parent of a collective entry must always have the same number of selections of that entry as all other instances of that parent entry who share a common parent.

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Grouping entries

Lets say we have a unit of 'Soldiers' who are each equipped with a 'Gun' and a 'Knife'. This would be represented something like this:

So far so good. But, when we add the unit to our roster it lists each model individually:

Since they're all equipped the same, wouldn't it be nice to have them collapse down into a single item? Well luckily, collective does just that! (Point 1, above)

If we mark the Gun and Knife as collective...

...we get a nicely formatted roster:

As an added bonus, Soldiers are now selected by spinner, rather than by the "+ Add" button.

Requiring same selection

Alternatively, we could have a unit of 'Ninjas', who can each pick individual gear from a long list of items. Something like this:

Now we could give them the option to take 'Climbing Claws'. However, they have the restriction that if one Ninja takes them, all of the Ninjas in the same squad have to also take them as well. Again, collective will do that (Point 2, above).

Mark our Climbing Claws as collective, and voila!

Selecting Climbing Claws on one Ninja selects it on all of them, and the same for deselecting.

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The dangers of Collective

Point 2, above, can be very handy as we saw in the example above, but as the same time it can create unintended behaviour if used incorrectly. For example, if our Soldiers from earlier were marked as collective, then all Infantry Units in the same force would automatically adjust their selections of Soldiers whenever any of them are modified.