Tutorial: Updating a document

(we need help to improve this translated tutorial)

One of the jLibrary core objectives is to allow working easily with documents, and by the way, the update of their attributes and/or contents. To update a document, the first thing you must do is open it. On the other hand, to open a document you only have to double-clicking over the document that you wish to open, and inmediatlly jLibrary will try to download the document contents and metadata from the server, and will try to choose the appropiate editor to show it.

Once that the document is opened, an editor will allow you to work with it. jLibrary allows to work simultaneously with multiple documents. When you have several opened documents, you can switch them with the upper editor tabs.

Each document have several edition tabs that allow working with it. The number and tabs can change based on the type of the document. For example, HTML ,XML or text documents have a source code tab to edit their contents. On the contrary, it wouldn't have sense to have a source code tab for a binary file, like could be an image document.

Next it will be described the most commont tabs that can be found when editing documents.

Content tab

The content tab shows a preview of the document contents. This screen can show text, web pages, images, and any other type of document content. One of the most interesting jLibrary features is the possibility to show binary contents thanks to its OLE integration support. jLibrary can also show this type of objects in other interfaces if the native browser of that interfaces allow to see the content of this files.

Normally the content tab only serves to show the document. But currently we have added support to Microsoft Office products family edition. So you can modify a Word, Excel, Powerpoint directly within this content tab.

Properties tab

The properties tab has five main sections :

The metadata section allows to enter metadata for the document like can be the title, its URL, its description or its importancy and author.

The description will be shown as a tooltip when the user put the mouse cursor over the document in the repository view. The author management button, will allow you to update the document's author. jLibrary allows to add, update or delete authors. Finally, the importancy slide, allows to serves as an importancy meter for the document. This value is important at search time, because the documents with higher importancy will be shown in the first positions of the result search lists.

The keywords tab allows to enter keywords by which the document will be indexed in jLibrary.

The categories tab allows to add or remove categories for this document. You can use the plus and minus button for this tasks.

The resources management tab shows the resources associated with this document. This resources will be downloaded at the time when the document is opened, because they are needed for its correct display. Moreover, from this section, you can add files or complete directories as resources, as well ass delete resources. jLibrary will index the resource contents if you have this preference. You can configure this from the preferences menu.

Finally the notes tab allows to add, update and remove notes. Notes allows us to include comments about the documents. jLibrary will index the notes content if you wish it, so next searchs would also look in notes content. You can configure this from the preferences menu.

Relations tab

The relations tab allows to se a relations dependency graphics between the different documents. Document relations are very important to obtain documents related to your current document view. This relations can be used to recommend other documents to an user, return related documents as search results, etc. If a document don't have any relations, you'll only see that document. If a document has relations, you'll see a directed graph with the document relations hierarchy.

Source code tab

The source code tab allows to edit document content. When you're dealing with some special types like XML or HTML, jLibrary also will offer color editing support, to make easier the edition of the document. In a future, we're planning to offer more complex editors, and more support to other documents. But remember, we need help!

Updating a document

When you modify some metadata, add or remove categories, notes or resources, or when you edit source code, it will be activated the save icon in the jLibrary toolbar.

You can use the Save all button ( at the right ) to save multiple modified documents. Once you have saved the document, the changes will be stored on the jLibrary server, and a new version will be created for that document. jLibrary allows to restore previous document versions if you wish it.

Congratulations ! Now you can edit documents :-)

-martin