A Mixin is a Design that contains Rules that are inherited by the Design to which you add the Mixin. A Mixin is not the parent of other Designs; the other Designs are separate entities. More on this concept.
In kBridge, your Designs gain access to the Mixin Rules via inheritance. A Design inherits all the Rules defined in the "mixed-in" Designs.
Mixin is simply our term for an inherited Design. The Design that contains the mixin acquires all of the rules that are defined in the mixin. Rules Inherited from mixins are shown in the editor along with the rules of the Design itself.
This Mixin behavior saves a rule author the effort of defining all of the Mixin’s rules within the Design being created. This kind of Design inheritance allows design abstraction and rule reuse.
A Design can have any number of Mixins – or none at all. Mixins are covered in more detail later.
A Design need not contain "Mixin" as a suffix (that is, it does not need to be named "[design name] Mixin"). However, Designs whose names do end in "Mixin" are treated specially by the editor; they are considered non-instantiable by themselves—that is, they cannot become a Model on your Model Tree. See next topic for more on Models. (The Model Tree contains instances of your Designs, that is, they are "instantiated."
