IBM DB2 Document Manager with IBM Records Manager Solution Guide

Chapter 3. Document Manager solution design and planning 55

3.2.2 Define data model

In the planning session, you identified the types of the documents your

Document Manager solution must handle. At a very high level, they are

correspondence documents, proposal documents, and reference documents.

In this section, we discuss the document data model that controls how you want

to store the documents in the repository and how you want to retrieve them.

Specifically, you need to define the following data model elements for the

documents:

򐂰 Attributes

򐂰 Item types and document classes

Attribute (library property) definitions

An attribute (also known as library properties in Document Manager) stores a

unit of data or values that describe a certain characteristic or property of an item

(an item can be a document or some other type of a content file). Examples of

attributes are proposal number and customer name. You use attributes to search

for an item. In the planning session, the process included identifying the

characteristics of a document type. You can use what you identified from that

session here.

Sometimes you can end up with different attributes for different document types.

Some of the attributes store similar information and they should not be created

twice for different documents. Attribute groupings and reuses help simplify the

system and avoid potentially creating too many attributes. Early consolidation or

grpMarketing X

grpSales X

grpFinancials X

grpViewers X

Attention: You assign groups to the appropriate roles, and you associate

roles with the appropriate document classes and states.

We discuss classes and states in the next section, Define data model. Once

you have read that section, you may want to return to this section to redefine

your groups and roles to ensure that your design meets your business

processes and requirements.

Groups Approvers Creators Reviewers Viewers

56 IBM DB2 Document Manager with IBM Records Manager Solution Guide

separation of the right attributes help avoid problems later in the implementation

phases.

In our case study, we defined sales, marketing, and services proposal

documents to have the following common attributes: Customer Name, Customer

Number, Request for Proposal Number, Proposal Subject, Create Date, Author,

Potential Revenue, Delivery Date, and From (customer e-mail). We defined the

correspondence documents to have the following document attributes: Customer

Name, Customer Number, From, To, Date Received, Request for Proposal

Number, and Mail Subject.

Table 3-4 shows the attribute definitions for the sample solution.

Table 3-4 Attributes (library properties)

Name Display name Attribute type Character

type

Character

length

Customer

Name

Customer

Name

Variable

character

Extended

alphanumeric

32

Customer

Number

Customer

Number

Variable

character

Extended

alphanumeric

32

RequestPropNum Request for

Proposal

Number

Variable

character

Extended

alphanumeric

32

Proposal Number Proposal

Number

Variable

character

Extended

alphanumeric

32

Proposal Subject Proposal

Subject

Variable

character

Extended

alphanumeric

32

Author Author Variable

character

Extended

alphanumeric

32

Potential

Rev

Potential Rev Variable

character

Extended

alphanumeric

CreateDate Create Date Date

DeliveryDate Delivery Date Date

eMailNumber eMail Track

Number

Double

From From Variable

character

Extended

alphanumeric

64

To To Va riabl e

character

Extended

alphanumeric

256