Properties are the individual values that describe an object.
Many properties are created by the system when an object is created.
You have full administrative control over creating, deleting, and
assigning properties.
Some of the behaviors of properties are as follows:
- Properties are based on a property template that you create by
running the Property Template wizard. You can
then assign the property to one or more classes where it becomes a
property of that class and of each new instance of that class.
- When a property is assigned to a document class, new documents,
including each new document version, based on that class inherit the
property. Each document or document version can potentially be assigned
a different value for the property. In other words, a property of
the class does not hold a single value that automatically applies
to all members of a version series.
- Properties hold values. For example, a Customer Name property
might have the value "John Smith".
- Properties have a data type that defines the kind of data the
property can contain. For example, an integer type property can hold
only a value that is an integer.
- Properties are either system (or built-in) properties or custom
properties. System properties are defined during installation. Custom
properties are created after installation by the system administrator,
by an application, or (depending on the exposed features of the application)
by users. For more information about the custom properties that are
added or modified by add-on features, see Add-on features.
- Properties can be marked as hidden, providing a hint to a client
application not to display the property to users.
- You can create association properties so that two properties in
two different classes are associated in some defined way.
- You can specify whether a property value is required or optional.
- Properties can be editable or read-only.
- Setting or modifying a property typically requires some access
right to the object to which the property belongs. However, properties
contain a modification access mask that you can optionally use to
assign additional security to individual properties. For more information,
see Property
modification access.
- You can view or modify the properties of an object by using the
object property sheet.
- Assigning a property to a class increases the row size in the
underlying database table; however, the method used to allocate the
space in the row size varies depending on the database software you
use. For example, some databases allocate the maximum length of the
property at the time when you assign the property to a class. To avoid
exceeding the row size allocate as little space as possible for the
initial size of a string property. For more information, see Minimize
database row sizes.