Local Attribute and Global Attribute Comparison

Specialized Administration > Tailoring Business Objects > Type and Attribute Management > Working with the Type and Attribute Management Utility > Managing Types > Type Information Page > Attributes Tab > Creating a New Attribute > Local Attribute and Global Attribute Comparison

The following table describes the differences between local attributes and global attributes:

Local Attributes	Global Attributes
Single-valued—can have zero or one value	Multi-valued—can have zero, one, or many values
Tied to a specific type and its subtypes	Can be used with multiple types
Stored in columns directly on the underlying object class	Stored in a separate database table

Always use local attributes unless one or more of the following are true:

• You need the attribute to be multi-valued

• You have a use case for the attribute to be used by multiple unrelated types

• Local attributes are not available on the type in question (columns for storing local attributes have not been added to the type)

Out of the box, there are no additional columns on any object class for local attributes. Additional columns must be added to a type for local attributes to be created. For more information, see Adding Columns to Types.

PTC recommends that administrators add columns to types for local attributes as they are needed. Adding columns to all types can add columns where they will not be used.

You can convert between local and global attributes by moving the values from one attribute to another on the same type using the TypeAttributeMoveTool utility. You can move values from a global attribute to a local attribute, or from a local attribute to a global attribute on the same type, provided both attributes are already present in the system. For more information, see Using the TypeAttributeMoveTool Utility.