Scenario
As a Plusplus organizer or admin with an event type you want to edit, you need to understand each of options available once editing an event type is complete.
What is an event type?
Event types are a template for individual, scheduled events. For instance, you might create an orientation event type as a piece of your standard onboarding program. You then schedule this orientation event as as needed, using the details you set up in the event type, such as location, organizers, presenters, and so on.
For more detail on how to start out with event type templates, please see: How to create and edit an event type
Solution
There are 3 options to perform once editing an event type is finished.
After editing an event type you can Cancel, Save, or Save & Apply from the top right with a drop down of the event type page after choosing to open the event type edit function:
Two of the three options are straightforward and work as expected.
Cancel - cancels out the all changes of editing the event type returning the user back to the event type's prior page with all your unsaved changes reverted.
Save - saves property changes to the event type you are editing. It will not propagate (or "cascade") changes to any child events. More on this in a moment.
Save & Apply
The Save & Apply action allows you to perform an additional step that affects not only the Event Type you are editing but all the Events that are created from it.
It is important to understand that Event Types have two different kinds of properties that may look the same on the edit page but function differently under the hood. Standard event properties are attributes of the Event Type and updating them will not affect the child Events.
As an example: if you edit the title of your Event Type and hit Save, previously scheduled Events that were created with the old title will not be updated.
However under Advanced Settings on the edit page are a variety of settings. Settings can often be accessed from the child object. If they are not explicitly set at the child level, the parent's value becomes the default value for the child. So updating an Advanced Setting of an Event Type (eg Notification Policies) will affect the behavior of Events that belong to it if they have not explicitly edited this setting.
Everything beneath this Advanced Settings delineator on the center edit page are all settings.
While this is complicated behavior, it is very useful and you might want this behavior for the regular properties of your Event Type. (Properties are the items above the line in the side menu and above the Advanced Settings section in the edit screen, while Settings are below the line in the side menu and items under the Advanced Settings section in the edit screen.)
Image of the dividing line within the left side hyperlinks:
Save & Apply attempts to provide this functionality by copying properties from the parent to child objects. If you hit Save & Apply you will be presented with a properties page where you can select which fields to cascade and which events should be affected:
So for instance using Save & Apply you could edit the Event Type title and also change all future Events that have been scheduled but not update the past events that have already run.
Please note that 3rd party survey links currently cannot be cascaded.
As expected there are caveats with how cascading works and when it will not work and for more detail on this we recommend reviewing our related article: How cascaded settings work.