Duplicate Relationships in Webtop

AdrianBuza

Hello,

Webtop allows you to create multiple duplicate "peer" relationships between two resources.

I was wondering, is this a feature with a particular use case in mind, or is it just something that was overlooked?

Regards,

Adrian Buza

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abc123

The DCTM allows you to create duplicate dm_relation relationships because the dm_relaiton relationship's uniqueness is guaranteed by the r_object_id.

But I agree that in common sense, this scalability does not make much sense to the business logic.

Francois Dauberlieu

I disagree, for example, in CAD and in our CAD integration software (DRAWbridge, a bit os shameless self promotion ), a CAD drawing can reference other CAD drawings and can also reference multiple times the same other drawings. In this instance, when a user detaches on of the instances of the reference, the others must remains. Our software extends all components such as edit/check in /check out/ Cancel check out etc... to make sure that when editing/viewing a drawing ALL its references are also there, otherwise, the CAD software wouldn't be able to find and display them therefore, we create 1 relation for each attachment.

I'm sure there's plenty other usages for that...

DCTM_Guru

Hi Francois,

I think the OP and Wei were saying that there is nothing on the Content Server that prevents from having a dm_relation from docA to docB and another dm_relation from docB to docA. So this relationship can be somewhat circular/duplicate.

My interpretation of your example is that docA references docB and docA is referenced by docC. The dm_relation object is not "duplicated". Am I interpretting your example wrong?

Just curious,

-Johnny

abc123

Hi Francois,

Could you explain a bit more about multiple references to the same CAD drawing? I am curious about it and would like to know its usecase.

Suppose that, you have a CAD drawing instance DrawingA and the other one DrawingB. You set 5 "peer" relationships from DrawingA to DrawingB with the same role "child". How would you distinguish each relationship from the others and what each relationship stands for?

Thanks in advance,

William

Francois Dauberlieu

Actually, in my case DocA can be related to DocB multiple time

In CAD softwares, you canhave multiple views, especially in 3D.

Let's say, you have a drawing representing the engine of a car and then you have a drawing that you will use to setup the layouts to plot this drawing. Let's call them Engine and Plot.

In Plot, you could have multiple layouts, one to plot the engine using a top view, one looking at the engine from the right, another from the front, etc...

In this instance, you need to reference Engine 3 times in Plot. Out software makes sure there are 3 relation objects so if I detach one of the views because for any reason I don't need it anymore (say, the customer doesn't want it anymore but wants another one), DRAWbridge makes sure the other 2 are still related and only removes the proper relation object.

My point here is that most Documentum users as well as developers are used to have 1 document = 1 Object in the repository. (I emphesize on the Most users , I know that Dctm supports links in Office documents), in CAd, it is the contrary, it's becoming less and less the case, most of the time, 1 drawing = n Objects. Our software makes sure that all objects are handled together.

This is also one of the reasons why Engineering departments are most of the time left out of the IT systems and the EDMS systems because most IT people have no clue about what they do and how the data and files are handled. I've been in the Engineering world for 25 years and in the Documentum world for 10 years and believe you me, I've seen Engineering left out in a lot of (very big) organizations. A lot of them are coming to us now as they're happy to joun the world in their companies.

PS: when we developed it, we were specifically asked by customers NOT to use VDM's which is one of the reasons we went the dm_relation route.

abc123

Your example is very clear, thanks a lot for explaining it. So from your example, we got to know the duplicate relationships are useful in real world.

Thanks,

- William

Francois Dauberlieu

Indeed. I hope nobody in EMC development will ever think it is not and remove that or I'd be in up to my neck