An industrial integrated development environment (IDE) provides a development framework for designing, programming, and configuring multiple aspects of an industrial automation system using a common design environment and data model. Projects creating using embodiments of the IDE system can be built on an object-based model rather than, or in addition to, a tag-based architecture. To this end, the IDE system can support the use of automation objects that serve as building blocks for this object-based development structure. To ensure consistency within and between projects, as well as to ensure that a given industrial project is dynamically updated to reflect changes to an industrial asset's attributes (e.g., control code, visualization definitions, testing scripts, analytic code, etc.), embodiments of the IDE system can use automation object inheritance features to propagate changes made to an automation object definition to all instances of the automation object used throughout a control project.