About Structured Documents

Document maps let you organize the content of your documents and choose which content is published.

You can use the map editor to define a hierarchy of topics for your document. For more information, see Document Maps.

The topics in the document map define the content for your document. Topics can include formatted and unformatted text, references to other topic's content, notes, footnotes, tables, sections, lists, figures, and images. You can choose to publish or exclude any topic. For more information, see Document Topics and Topic Elements.

Data topics can contain external data, such as data tables represented as formatted tables (a dataframe) or images represented as figures (an imageframe). You can add data topics using the Structured Document Editor storage service REST interface with an external data management application such as BIOVIA Pipeline Pilot. You must verify the contents of data topics to validate the representation of the external data in Structured Document Editor. You can always trace the origin of the content of data topics, identify its modifications, review the users involved, and track its lifecycle. For more information, see Working with Data Topics.

When you open a topic or document map in the document editor, it locks that topic or map to all other users. If someone else has an item locked, it shows a key  in the home page with a tooltip reporting the name of the user who has locked the topic. Locked topics are read-only in the document editor, with the name of the user making edits shown.

The key  displays only if you can unlock the topic or document map, that is, if you locked it or you are a Leader or Repository Manager. For more information, see Structured Document Management Access to Content.

You can open the locked topic or map in read-only mode, but you cannot make any changes. If you have an item locked and you save your changes, the app releases the lock and other users can edit it. When you try to make another edit, the app first verifies whether another user has locked the topic or document map before it allows you to make any changes. Leaders and Repository Managers can force the release of locks on document maps and topics. For more information, see Unlocking Maps and Topics.