Routine tasks performed by every Zim developer are creating, erasing, recreating, moving, and copying objects. Collectively, these tasks are called Object Maintenance. ZOM provides considerable assistance to the developer in this area.

ZOM is designed to process sets of objects and maintain knowledge of object dependencies. ZOM operates on sets of objects, rather than one object at a time. The knowledge of interdependencies enables the ZOM services to intelligently manage a set of objects and sequence operations properly.

When moving a set of objects from one directory to another, ZOM examines the list of objects specified and determines the correct order in which to move them, based on the interdependencies among the objects. The objects are then moved one at a time in the correct sequence.

The following subsections describe how ZOM services can be used to perform common object maintenance tasks. Although the examples tend to be simple, all services described support the various selection criteria and options.

All the ZOM object maintenance services also deal automatically with dependent objects affected by the processes you initiate. For example, dependent objects that become “out-of-date” because of a change to a dependent object are automatically updated. You can control how much work ZOM does to maintain dependent objects by customizing the ZOM configuration. For more information, see ZOMConfig.