Structure

Information has to be stored in a flat hierarchy. If all documents are in one folder, there will never be a reason to move them to another. Simply since there is none.

Finding information in the folder would be cumbersome if the only place to look for documents is actually browsing the documents in that folder. Thanks to categorization the authors may add additional views. These views provide additional entry points. Since views use dynamic lists, these view will update automatically when the categories of a document change.

If there are categories that will never change, for instance the type of a document, then this information may also allow to open another folder to store documents. Note that storing a document in a physical location is simply putting it in one of several views. But the physical location has an impact on reorganization. All other views do not. The projectdoc Toolbox provides the concept of homepages for doctypes to organize documents in well-known folders.

Whenever a document is stored as a child to another document, then these two pages are in a tight relationship. To prevent the need for reorganization in the case of a change in one of those documents, this tight relationship expresses in a welded lifespan. That is that the lifetime of the child document is bound to the parent document. In case the parent document is removed, then all child documents should be removed to (except for reorganizing efforts demanded by other constraints).

Advantages

• Flat hierarchies reduce the risk of reorganization due to changes of data or metadata in documents.
• Storing documents on invariant data helps to impose a simple organization while not risking restructuring efforts.

Disadvantages

• Flat hierarchies require additional means to organize the content. If there is only one organization category that never changes, deep hierarchies would have no disadvantages are would not require additional views.

Related Practices

The following practices are related to this practice.

Resources

For more information regarding this practice please refer to: