IBM FileNet P8, Version 5.2            

Manage compound documents

About compound documents

Grouping and establishing relationships with documents involves associating a parent document with one or more child documents. Parent and child documents are created independently from each other. When you establish how the documents relate to each other in a compound document, the information is stored in a link that is created. This is different from the link you can create to link different kinds of objects such as folders, documents, and custom objects.

The documents included in a compound document can reside in different locations in one object store. You cannot create a compound document using custom objects and folders nor can you create a compound document that includes documents residing in different object stores. If there is no obvious hierarchical relationship between documents, you can create a parent document that has no content (this is an external file) and specify that the related documents are children of that document.

Creating a compound document

You first create the parent and then associate additional documents as children when creating a compound document. You perform similar procedures on parent and child documents as you would with standard documents. For example, you can view information pages for parent and child documents as well as the information for links that associate the documents with each other. Both parent and child documents can be versioned and you can assign a name to the link between parent and child. Special settings when you are adding, modifying or inserting a child document allow you to manage that document during the event its parent document is versioned or deleted.

Modifying and deleting compound documents

In addition, you can modify the order in which child documents appear in the parent's list of child documents, select additional child documents, insert new documents, and remove links connecting the documents.

Helpful hints

Table 1. This table lists helpful hints for creating compound documents and working with these documents.
Action Information
Create a parent document
  • When adding it to the object store (manually or via an entry template). The child documents must already exist in the object store.
  • When checking in a new version.
  • By selecting Change Compound from its pop-up menu. Once the document is converted, it can be associated with child documents and other parent documents. You can also revert a compound document back to a standard document. But you cannot revert a compound document back to a standard document if it has associated child documents. You must first remove the associated child documents.

This action is not available when you access:

  • the information page for a document that is a Reservation object.
  • a document from an integrated application, such as Word or Excel.
Associate child documents with a parent document
  • When adding the parent document to the object store
  • When checking in a new version
  • When viewing its information page (Child Documents view)
  • Use the Show link while adding a document to view a list of child documents associated with a specific parent document. In addition, you can also perform additional actions, such as modifying the order in which the documents appear, when you have more than one child document.
Link Info and compound document link properties The compound document link properties view on the information page is a read-only page that provides a current snapshot of the component relationship link between a specific child document and its parent document. The information displayed allows you to manage the relationship between a child document and parent document when, for example, a parent document is versioned or deleted.

The property information that appears is created when you first associate a child document with a parent document. Change the properties displayed on this page when you modify the child document.

System properties are also read-only and cannot be edited. Depending on your User Preference settings, the system properties might be collapsed (hidden). Click Show System Properties or Hide System Properties to toggle displaying the system properties.

You can access the compound document link properties view when you open the information page for a parent document or a child document.

View the documents associated with a compound document

In Workplace XT, you can quickly view the child documents associated with a specific parent document. Information about each document is displayed in the list view and you see the hierarchical relationship for each document.

Right-click a document and select More Information > View Compound Document to see a compound document. You can also perform specific actions on the documents.



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Last updated: March 2013
wp_document_compound002.htm

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