docId (Document ID)

What is a docId?

“docId” is one of the “magic” content control tag names. A docId is an alphanumerical ID (e.g., “R1-100”) that uniquely identifies and sorts documents (e.g., Annex 1) within a set of documents.

What should a docId look like?

Since the docId is used to “uniquely identify and sort” documents, it makes sense to use a hierarchical key with groups of alphanumerical characters (A-Z, 0-9) separated by a hyphen (“-“). A docId should include a hyphen, because, when creating a DocumentTracker, DokuMate will interpret the initial sequence of characters of a file name up to but excluding the first space (” “) or underscore (“_”) as a docId if that sequence contains a hyphen. For example, in the file name:

R01-100_Appendix 1 (Applications)_2018-05-22_v1.0_@ABC_[Draft].pdf

“R01-100” will be interpreted as the docId. This is helpful because, other than for Microsoft Office documents, such metadata can’t be stored in arbitrary documents (e.g., PDF) and must be encoded in the file name.

In this example, the docId consists of two components:

1. “R01”, a code for “the larger set of documents,” and
2. “100”, a code for the document within the subset, e.g., Appendix 1.

What are the design considerations?

How you design the docId is your own choice. Apart from using at least two components separated by a hyphen, the main recommendation is to use a syntax that produces the desired sort order in a DocumentTracker, in the file system, and on SharePoint (or your DMS of choice). For example, using “800” for Exhibit 8 and “810” for Attachment 8.1 ensures that Attachment 8.1, part of Exhibit 8, comes after and not before Exhibit 8 when you list the documents. If you have Attachment 8.1.1, its code would be “811”, meaning it also appears in the right place.

When defining your docId syntax, we recommend you test how Excel, the Windows File Explorer, and your DMS of choice (e.g., SharePoint) would sort the file names using your docIds as a prefix. You might find out that the sort orders are different.