multiple document types in a single folder or?
drew Roberts
management / workflow system test.
My initial idea was to set up various folders through which the
documents in question would pass. Various users or groups would have
access to the various folders and the documents would pass along /
down the chain (and occasionally back up the chain) as various things
happened along the way.
The thing is, we have at least 3 types of documents needed for this to function:
Contracts
Production Orders
Scripts
I really do not want to have a separate chain for each type of
document. Is there some way to allow folders to hold multiple types of
documents?
If not, would it be possible to put a "document type" field in a
module and then have the fields that get entered and displayed be
conditional on that choice?
Is there another way to get this to work that I have not thought of yet?
all the best,
paulzarucki
The idea that a folder contains one particular type of document seems
to be fundamental to the design of Simple Groupware, so I suspect it
would be very difficult to enable multiple document types to be stored
in a single folder.
However, there are alternatives that fit more naturally with Simple
Groupware which might meet your needs.
The first, and probably best, approach is to use "view tabs" instead
of folders for the workflow stages. For example, the Tasks module has
Status and Progress fields to indicate the status and progress of each
task. Instead of having separate folders for each stage in the
workflow, your documents could have a field to indicate the stage or
status. If you want documents that are at different stages to be
listed separately then you can have different views of the same
folder, represented by the first row of tabs. The Tasks module, for
example, has the tabs
| Open | Calendar (Open) | Closed | ...
whereas your module could have
| Stage 1 | Stage 2 | Stage 3 | ...
Click the appropriate tab to see the documents belonging to a
particular stage. You would have a separate folder/module for each
type of document but not for the stages in the workflow.
The stage tabs can be achieved using the following lines near the
start of yourmodule.xml:
<view name="display" displayname="Stage 1" where="stage='first
stage'">
</view>
<view name="stage2" displayname="Stage 2" where="stage='second stage'"
template="display">
</view>
<view name="stage3" displayname="Stage 3" where="stage='third stage'"
template="display">
</view>
then put the following lines in the body of yourmodule.xml to allow
the stage of a document to be set by selecting from a drop-down list:
<field name="stage" displayname="Stage" simple_type="select"
simple_size="1" simple_default="first stage">
<data values="first stage|second stage|third stage"/>
</field>
The second option is to use "field tabs" to achieve something like
your idea of a "document type" field. Your module could have all of
the fields required by all of the document types, with the fields
organised onto different tabs according to function. For example, the
tasks module has the tabs
| General | Miscellaneous | Responsible |
whereas your module could have
| General | Contract | Order | Script |
-- just use the appropriate fields and tabs according to the type of
information that you want to record.
You could even add a "document type" field and use it to separate
different document types onto different view tabs. Alternatively, if
certain fields are only populated in certain types of document, e.g.
all orders having an order number, then documents could be separated
onto different view tabs on this basis.
View tabs and field tabs, used individually or in combination, provide
a lot of flexibility.
Regards,
Paul.
drew Roberts
I began some experiments earlier today and have come close to some of
these ideas. The one thing with the "view tabs" instead of folders
thought is how to limit rights to various groups based on which view
tab it is visible in... Any ideas for this?
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