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If I open two Artifact Explorers, on different branches, I can drag an artifact from one to the other and the "Confirm Inter Artifact Explorer Drop" window appears, asking whether I want to introduce the artifact into the destination branch as a new transaction. Now, this is really clever, as it means that I can copy a piece of work from one branch to another but keep the same artifact IDs, which will make merging and lots of other things easier in the future. I can select a whole bunch of artifacts, and drag-and-drop them. However, if I do that, I lose their hierarchy. This is the same as if I copy and paste them, so isn't unreasonable. However, what if I want to copy a bunch of related artifacts from one branch to another, and maintain their hierarchy? If I do a copy and paste special, with the "Include children of copied artifacts" box ticked, I get new artifact IDs, which isn't what I want. Could we have a new menu option, which is only accessible when a copy is done on one branch and a right-click is then done on another, called "Introduce ...", with the same options as paste-special please? This could then allow whole hierarchies to be copied from one branch to another, maintaining artifact IDs, which would be a good way of achieving re-use when only part of the work on a branch is wanted. Note: This enhancement may not be necessary depending on the outcome of https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=311592, which could mean that the hierarchy gets preserved anyway.
What we have to do is eliminate only the relations to artifact IDs that (a) don't currently exist on the destination branch and (b) are not being copied as part of the current operation. This might also require a review of the modtype lifecycle for relations; I don't know if we currently use the INTRODUCED modtype for relation links.
