Document properties and document management

Carefully assess your document management needs before you define document properties. Not only must you control the number of properties, but also consider their size. A 1024-character property uses more storage space than a 32-character property.

Limited document properties do not need database table space; however, they occupy space for each document in each document properties file that contains the property.

Using database document properties lets you display document information in the user interface and lets you process documents globally (without knowing which job contains each document), but putting document information in the database has a performance cost. Document properties in the database use space in the database tables. Updates to properties increase logging activity and create possible database contention. The database caches information in memory. With fewer and smaller-sized properties, the database can cache more records in memory and provide better system performance.

Several steps and actions process documents in the database. The database system locks database rows during processing. As more document processing occurs, the impact on system resources increases. You can tune your step templates to limit the number of concurrent steps that process documents in the database.

These steps and actions cause updates to the database:

• WriteDocumentsToDatabase adds entries for each document to the database and assigns each such entry a document identifier.
• ReadDocumentsFromDatabase retrieves document information from the database and stores it in a document properties file. No updates are done on the database.
• CompleteDocuments changes the state of all documents in the job to Complete.
• CreateJobsFromDocuments and CreateAFPJobsFromDocuments create a new association between documents and the child jobs that are created.
• RemoveJobs notifies RICOH ProcessDirector when jobs are deleted. When RICOH ProcessDirector deletes a job that has documents in the database, it deletes the documents from the database.
• UpdateDocumentsInDatabase updates the document properties in the database using the values from the document properties file.
• The Process Again action requires approval from document processing features. Document processing features do not let RICOH ProcessDirector process an original job again if the documents for that job are also associated with other jobs.
• Opening the Document properties notebook from the Documents portlet retrieves document property values from the database. Only properties that are stored in the database appear in the property notebook.

This list shows steps and actions in order according to how many database resources they use. The most resource-intensive items are at the top.

1. RemoveJobs
2. CompleteDocuments
3. WriteDocumentsToDatabase
4. CreateJobsFromDocuments or CreateAFPJobsFromDocuments
5. Displaying the Documents table in the user interface
6. ReadDocumentsFromDatabase
7. Process Again
8. Opening the Documents property notebook from the Documents table