Keywords feature in iManage

Ben_inform

Hi All,

We have a requirement to implement a keywords feature in iManage to match that of the keyword feature used in PC DOCS for our customers implementation.
This is how it works in PC DOCS
In DOCS a user can attach keywords when profiling a document. The dialog has a edit box and a browse button similar to the imanage lookup fields but you can multi-select values from the lookup. Clicking on the keyword lookup button brings up a list of predefined keywords. Having selected from the list of keywords the selected items are pasted into the corresponding edit box, if the value contains muliple keywords they are comma separated in the edit box.. When a user wishes to do a keyword search they would select the keywords and if any of them exist in the keywords fields the document is returned.
Obviously the first issue is that iManage doesn't support multi-selection values in the new profile.
Second, when searching on lookup fields there is no boolean seach feature (i.e. the ability to search for one string OR another within a field).
One way we had was to put the keywords into the bottom of the comments section- that would take care of the boolean searching, then write code to override a lookup button to display a custom form to be able to multi-select values. On clicking OK from that form it would write the selected keywords at the bottom of the comments field.
When doing a search the user would type into the "keywords / comments" edit box and it would appear to search both (but in actual fact it would be the same field).
We would like to know if there was a better way of attempting to provide this feature and if anyone else had done so.

Thanks for your help,

STodd

Hi,

You could take it a stage further, and save yourself some work in the long run. You could store all keywords in an unused custom table, and write a new command to add to the 'Document' menu that's sole purpose was only to assign keywords. Using the command wrapper available with the SDK, and the iManage COM model, it is not a huge leap to create a small DLL to pop-up a multi-select iManage dialog (given that you will have a context to use), and on closing the dialog actually insert the keywords into the Comments of the document object (as you will have the currently-selected document as part of the context).

The only thing you would need to be careful of is that you make the command enabled only when a single document is selected - it will be a lot harder to manage if you allow it to be available when many documents are selected.

Hope this helps.

Steve

Multiple_copies.zip