Usage of i_position in DQL to preserve order of values of a repeatable property

GlenLantz

I have the following DQL query:

select r_object_id, r_modify_date, authors from dm_document where

FOLDER (ID('0cde75d18000ed03'))

order by r_modify_date

I have found that the values of the authors in the result will be situated not in proper order (the order I see in WebTop when I open authors of a document).

I have googled and found the following solution:

select r_object_id, r_modify_date, authors from dm_document where

FOLDER (ID('0cde75d18000ed03'))

order by r_modify_date , i_position desc

I see it works. But how I understand, the usage of the i_position desc is undocumented solution – in ‘Documentum_System_66_Object_Reference.pdf’ I have just not found explanation of what the i_position desc is.

The question is: can I rely on the solution? Have someone met any problems with it?

JorgKrause

Hi,

interesting that this isn't documented anywhere

If you select i.e. select r_object_id,authors,i_position from dm_document,

you'll see that i_position values are something -1,-2,-3,-4. That's why order by i_position desc

works for you, and this is also the order the repeating attributes are returned by underlying DFC methods,

meaning that authors[0] will return i_position -1, authors[1] i_position -2 and so on.

This has been like this since I started to work with Documentum, which means for 12 years.

So I guess you can assume that this is going to work in the future as well.

Regards

Jørg