You can define any of the main object types as a template object, which you can then reuse. To define an object as a template, you add it to the Types collection, either on the Document, or on the parent object (such as the Compound.Types collection). To reuse the template, you set up a reference to the template using the Reference property on the relevant object. This feature is typically used for category lists when several questions in the project contain the same list of responses.

For a Visual Basic example of creating a shared category list, see Shared category lists. This example shows how you can set up a shared category list that contains an Other Specify category. However, it does not show how to create additional helper variables for the Other variable. If you wanted to do this, you would simply create the required variables (such as a categorical variable called Codes to hold the coded open-ended responses and a text variable called SourceFile to hold the .tiff file name) and add them to the Other variable's HelperFields collection.

The native value cannot be set until the Elements collection is attached to a variable.