In IBM® CMIS for Content Manager, a document is known as a converted, extended, or CMIS-optimized document type if it has extended metadata for the standardized name attribute and databases indexes. CMIS-optimized document types support optional extended metadata that adds features and optimizes performance with IBM CMIS for Content Manager.
The IBM CMIS for Content Manager work best with CMIS-optimized document types. The optional extended metadata supports additional fields and properties in the CMIS data model and optimizes behavior for the documents. You can add different subsets of additional fields to the CMIS-optimized document types. The optional extended metadata is grouped into special attribute groups that are hidden from property sheets and are supported only within the attribute group. Although you must add the attribute group to document types, support for each field is detected by existence of the individual attribute within the group, such as if an attribute is omitted in a document type or filtered out by an item type subset view. You can customize attribute and attribute group definitions for each document type, such as choosing a different maximum length value, default value, or other constraint.
CMIS-optimized document types support one or more of the following optional extended metadata groups:
The fields use only the attribute within the correct group, not independent attributes outside of the group or attributes that belong to different groups. If they are added as independent attributes or as a different group name, the attributes function only through property sheets and are not associated with the field. The only exception is the repository standardized name attribute, ICM$NAME, which must exist as an individual attribute without an attribute group.
The most important optional extended metadata group is the Content group or the universal standardized name attribute. Specifically, the most important extension is the either the universal standardized name attribute, ICM$NAME, or the alternate standardized name attribute Label in the Content group. The existence of the Label attribute or standardized name attribute alone defines whether a document type detected as CMIS-optimized in terms of behavior. Without the standardized name attribute, documents and folders are unconverted document types, which are not locatable by name alone and are supported in a compatibility mode, as described in the next section.
IBM CMIS for Content Manager also supports document types that are not CMIS-optimized, and do not have the optional extended metadata. Therefore, you can work with your existing documents and document types, which are called unconverted document types. Unconverted document types often work just as well as converted document types in IBM CMIS for Content Manager. However, in some cases unconverted document types must operate in a compatibility mode that uses a best-effort mapping that might not be optimal. Also, unconverted document types do not support persistence of any field that requires extended metadata to persist the value and cannot be mapped using a best-effort mapping. However, if path indexing is enabled, all name and path-related behaviors become equally optimized as any other optimized document type or folder type even if the document type or folder type is not extended or optimized.
For example, the title and description fields are ignored and not persisted for unconverted document types. Also, the name might not always be mapped correctly when retrieving individual document properties unless path indexing is enabled.
Even unconverted document types support names (labels), in most cases, but the name mapping varies by document type, item type subset view, or sometimes by item. If available, the native Content Manager EE original file name field is mapped from the following:
However, the native field is not always available for multi-part documents if there are no parts or the parts are not accessible or not retrieved for performance reasons. If the native original file name field is not available or not retrieved, IBM CMIS for Content Manager detects the best possible attribute that represents a name on the root component of the item. Many custom document types have an attribute that contains a name, but is not standardized. If you have a name attribute, flag it as representative in the document type definition to indicate that it is your name for the item and can be used as a file name. You might see different names, depending the limited data that is retrieved to optimally perform a particular operation, and depending on the item type subset view you have access to. If path indexing is enabled, the fully mapped name is indexed and might be reused for better behavior.
Also, compared with CMIS-optimized document types, unconverted document types are more dependent on the application's ability to recognize important state changes and use the fast path or ID that is reported by IBM CMIS for Content Manager. If a document changes states and the application does not automatically refresh its references or use the updated references returned by the services after a state change, you will need to manually refresh your folder view or close and reopen your document to continue working with it. Depending on the application, if you do not refresh your folder view or close and reopen your document, subsequent operations might report an error, report that the document has been deleted or is not found, or do nothing at all. In some cases, the application might save a new copy of the document instead of updating the existing document. Important state changes include:
Smaller state changes include:
In some cases, the document transforms into an entirely different document, such as when checking in a document for the first time when it becomes a published document for the first time. Also, the fast path and ID for document objects are different than the fast path and ID for drafts of their parent documents.
However, if you are using a CMIS-optimized document type, IBM CMIS for Content Manager can detect and correct the outdated IDs and fast paths so that you can continue to use the document without refreshing, even if the application does not recognize the change. CMIS-optimized document types use the configuration setting findDocumentWithoutFastAccessPath to find the document by name when the ID or fast path is outdated.