Whenever a user or an administrator selects a folder in Enterprise Manager or applications such as Workplace, the folder displays icons that represent the documents, custom objects, and other folders that the folder contains and some information about those objects. This list of information is sometimes called the folder list view, and the information it contains needs to be understood.
The information that is displayed about documents is the latest major
version of the document, and if the document has no major version, then the latest minor
version. Before the initial reservation version of the document is checked in,
meaning that there is not yet either a major nor a minor version of the document,
the reservation appears in the folder. For example, the folder in the preceding screen capture
contains a document titled Bob's trip report
. The size, the
create date, the major and minor numbers, and the status of released are all
the properties of the latest major version of this document. There can in fact
be more recent minor versions of this document, which you can discover if
you open the document Property
sheet and examined the versions tab.
The document properties that appear normally include properties such as the size, class, last modifier, date last modified, and version number of the document. The properties that appear and the order in which they appear is configurable using the MMC's View > Choose Columns menu.
When checkins, checkouts, promotions, and demotions take place, the reference to the document is automatically updated so that the latest major version continues to display in the folder.
Users with view only permissions (View Content, View Properties) are able to view only the document being displayed. Other versions in the history of that document, for example more recent minor versions or superseded major versions, are not available to that user. There might be an icon or other indicator that later minor versions exist.
However, system administrators with permission to modify content, modify properties, promote versions, and so on, are not limited by the folder display of the latest major version. These users can access documents using Enterprise Manager and drill down to find the entire version series of the document, view the content of earlier versions, check out the current version even if it happens to be a minor version that was not appearing in the folder list view, and do other tasks allowed by Enterprise Manager.
A variable in these rules about what appears in folders, is that custom objects and document objects are not required to appear in a folder. Applications can be written that do not place a document into a folder. And you can remove documents and custom objects from a folder by unfiling them.