Managing Technical Documents

The functionality provided by the Technical Documentation application, along with the core capabilities of Aras Innovator, enable an organization to distribute technical documentation content authoring across the enterprise. The enabling features include Versioning, Access Control, Relationships, Lifecycle, and Workflow. This section describes how change is managed using Versioning and identifies the default Permissions and Lifecycle Maps for Access Control and Lifecycles respectively.

A Technical Document is seldom a single, self-contained Item. It is expected that each will frequently contain other referenced document material, graphics, and information from related Business Objects (Items). All these components evolve independently and thus affect the documents that refer to them. Relationship configuration between Technical Documents and all referenced Items will control how documents are updated. Figure 45 shows the default Relationships from a Technical Document. Note that all referenced Items are versioned, including Technical Documents. Also note that, other than a Link Relationship, all Relationships are fixed. That is a Technical Document will refer to a specific Version of each related Item for all content that is, or that potentially is, included in the document.

When a referenced Item (Technical Document, Business Object, or Graphic) has been updated the content contained in the source document is highlighted. The node in the Navigation Pane for the top-most Document Element will be rendered in red with the current Revision and Version appended to the node text in square brackets and an added tooltip signifying the existence of the updated Item. The content for the referenced Item is surrounded in a red, dotted border. Note that the original content of the document is still displayed.

An author can view the latest version of a referenced Item. Doing so will load the Form of the ItemType. For example, for referenced Technical Documents, the Technical Documentation Framework will be opened showing the contents of the latest version; for Graphics, the Form for the Graphic will be displayed; for referenced Business Objects, the associated Form for that Item will be displayed. Note that for referenced Business Objects that include generated content (see Section 3.7) only the Form of the referenced Item will be displayed.

Document Elements that refer to referenced data that has been updated will have the following context sub-menu - Version:

Select View Latest to load the appropriate Form showing the latest version of the referenced Item.

To view the latest content from the referenced Item, select Update to Latest in the Version sub-menu. The document will be updated based on the type of referenced content. For Graphics, the latest image will be displayed. For reference Technical Documents, the latest content of the document will be displayed. For Business Objects with generated content, the Content Generator will be called on the latest version of the referenced Item and the document updated accordingly. As always, users must save the Technical Document to apply the changes to the document and update the corresponding Relationships.

Authors can opt to ignore subsequent versions of referenced content either by selection Ignore or Ignore All Versions in the Version sub-menu. By selecting Ignore, only the specific latest version will be ignored. By selecting Ignore All Versions, all subsequent versions will be ignored. Ignoring updated versions only means that the Editor will not prompt the user with the styling applied in Figure 46. The data associated with the currently referenced Item will always be displayed. However, once the author chooses to ignore updated versions of referenced content, they can restore tracking of these versions (and thus turn the display of updated content back on) by choosing Resume Version Tracking in the Version sub-menu.