Document Concepts

Fundamentally, a document can be thought of as two things:

A Document object represents a single version of a document stored in a Content Engine object store.

Document Object Characteristics

Document objects include the following characteristics:

Document Content

A document's content data is represented by a ContentElement object. A document can have zero, one, or more content elements. The content data represented by the content element can be local to an object store or external to it and, therefore, outside the control of the Content Engine server. Local content elements are represented by a ContentTransfer object, while external ones are represented by a ContentReference object.

Each content element has an ElementSequenceNumber property that contains a server-generated, unique, and unchanging identity for the content element. In other words, even though a content element's relative position within the list of content elements for a document version might change, its ElementSequenceNumber would not. For a given document version, element sequence numbers are not reused.

Document Storage

An object store consists of one or more physical locations called storage areas for storing both metadata and content. When creating a document, you can explicitly assign a storage area to the document. You can also use a storage policy to control storage area assignment. A storage policy is user-specified criteria that can be applied to a document for determining a candidate pool of storage areas. For more information on storage areas and policies, see Content storage in the Content Engine Administration Help.

Document Federated Ownership

Federated content is document content stored on another system (for example, FileNet Image Services) that can be accessed from a FileNet P8 object store, and vice-versa. The intent of federation is to provide uniform access to all content and thereby remove the need for migrating data. By default, a federated system restricts access to content independently of where the content might be stored. For example, an Image Services system imposes restrictions on accessing a document based on Image Services security, regardless of whether the content for the document resides in a FileNet P8 object store or within the Image Services system. You can override this default behavior for specific documents via the takeFederatedOwnership method and cause document content to become read-only when accessed from systems other than FileNet P8 (including content stored on those system). Such content could be deleted only when accessed from a FileNet P8 object store.