About Documents

Documents contain one or more files. Documents can be either owned or referenced, and the files within a document can be either versioned or nonversioned.

This page discusses:

See Also
Creating an Owned Document
Creating a Reference to a Document

Owned and Reference Documents

A document can be either an owned document or a referenced document.

Owned Documents

An owned document is owned by the simulation process or simulation activity. When you create a document from the Content page of a simulation process or simulation activity, you are creating an owned document.

When you perform a PLM operation on a simulation process (or simulation activity), the same operation is applied to any document that is 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.

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

A referenced document refers to a document that already exists. You should create referenced documents for data that will not change often and that will be shared across simulation processes and simulation activities; for example, data that are used to define material properties.

A reference to a document can be thought of as a link to a document. Operations on a simulation process or simulation activity do not change the references to a document. For example, if you copy a simulation process, the new process continues to refer to any referenced documents.

If you have a document stored in a simulation process, you can use the document in an unrelated simulation activity by referring to the document in the simulation process. This allows multiple, unrelated activities to share a document inside a simulation process. You can create a download rule in a simulation activity that moves a referenced document from a simulation process to the working directory. (Similarly, you can create a download rule in a simulation activity that moves a referenced simulation folder from a simulation process to the working directory; however, the simulation process must be the parent of the simulation activity that is executing the rule.)

Versioned and Nonversioned Files

When you check a file into a document containing versioned files, Process Composer for Dashboard first creates a new document inside the original document (a subdocument) with the same name as the file. Process Composer for Dashboard then checks the file into the new subdocument. As a result, a document containing versioned files contains a new subdocument for each checked-in file. In contrast, when you check a file into a document containing nonversioned files, Process Composer for Dashboard stores the file directly inside the document.

You can remove obsolete and temporary files from a document by archiving and purging the document. Archiving allows you to save the files in a local directory; purging removes the files from the document.

Note: When you update a document and change its version or check a file into a nonversioned document, Process Composer for Dashboard displays the document as out of date in an impact graph. In contrast, if you revise a document, Process Composer for Dashboard does not display the document as out of date in an impact graph until you update the simulation process to refer to the new revision.

Documents containing versioned files

When you first check in or upload a versioned file, Process Composer for Dashboard sets its version number to 1. When you check in an updated version of the file, Process Composer for Dashboard increments its version to 2. You can recover previous versions of a file. In addition, you can use the description of the check in to understand the changes that were made to each version of the file.

Documents containing nonversioned files

Nonversioned files have no versioning information; Process Composer for Dashboard overwrites the original file when you check it back into the database. You can access only the most recent version of a file; older versions are overwritten.

Maintaining multiple versions of large files consumes large amounts of disk space. Therefore, you may want to use a document containing nonversioned files if the files are large.