About Documents

You can create owned documents or referenced documents. You can create a download rule in an activity that downloads the files from the document to the working directory.

Owned documents

When you add a document to a simulation process or simulation activity from the Content panel, you create a document that is owned by the simulation process or simulation activity—an owned document. When you create an owned document, you can specify that it will contain either versioned or non-versioned files.

When you perform an operation on a simulation process (or simulation activity), the same operation is applied to the documents that are owned by the simulation process (or activity). For example, if you copy a simulation process, the new process contains copies of any owned documents and the copied documents are owned by the new process. Similarly, if you delete the simulation process, the owned documents are deleted.

The lifecycle state of an owned document is inherited from the lifecycle state of the simulation process or activity that owns it. This Simulation Document has a "Simulation Document Owned' policy and displays the state "Exists", but the lifecycle state is inherited from the process or activity that owns it.

Referenced documents

When you add referenced content, you are referencing a document that already exists. A reference to a document can be thought of as a link to a document. Changes to the lifecycle of the simulation process or activity do not affect the document. If you delete the simulation process or activity, the link to the document is discarded; but the document still exists. Similarly, if you copy a simulation process, the new process continues to refer to any referenced documents.

If you have a document defined as content in a simulation process, you can use the document in a simulation activity by creating a reference to the document in the simulation process. This allows multiple, unrelated activities to share a document inside a simulation process. You can create referenced documents for content that will not change often and that will be shared across activities and simulation process; for example, data that are used to define material properties in a physics simulation.

When you create an owned document, you can specify that it will contain either versioned or non-versioned files. Only files can be versioned.

Documents containing versioned files

When you first check a versioned file into a document, Optimization Process Composer sets its version number to 1. When you check in an updated version of the file, Optimization Process Composer increments its version to 2. You can recover previous versions of a file. In addition, you can use the check-in description to explain the changes that were made to each version of the file.

Documents containing non-versioned files

Non-versioned files have no versioning information. Optimization Process Composer overwrites the original file when you check it back in. You can access only the most recent version of a file; older versions are overwritten.

Maintaining multiple versions of large files can consume large amounts of disk space. Therefore, you may want to use a non-versioned document if it contains large files.