A Parent Child Data Transfer enables the value of an attribute to be transferred from the parent to a new child. It is set up in the initialization code for an application, by specifying the type of a child and the names of the attributes in parent and child. When a child of that type is created and a parent child data transfer exists for that type then the value of the attribute from the parent is used as the initial value for the attribute in the child. Obviously the attributes must be of the same type. If attributes do not exist with the given names then nothing happens. The type of the parent is not specified; it is assumed that either the type of parent is implicitly selected by the existence of a suitable attribute, or that the transfer should occur whichever parent type.