Welded Lifespan

If documents are added as children to a document, these documents share the lifespan of the parent. If the parent is removed, so are the children.

Domain
Documentation
Type
Knowledge Organization
Principles
Stable Dependencies Principle

Adding a document as a child to a parent document has implications. If the parent is removed, how should we deal with the children?

How can we deal with parent-child relationships?

Structure

If documents are added as children to a document, these documents share the lifespan of the parent. If the parent is removed, so are the children.

This does not imply to remove the children without thought. If the parent is removed due to an reorganization of the information, the information in these documents may move to another location or the child documents simply continue to exist one level up in the hierarchy.

Advantages

  • With this definition the relationship between a parent document and its child documents is defined making it easier to create with flat hierarchies.

Disadvantages

  • The consequences are quite strict. Team members may not be familiar with this interpretation.

Related Practices

The following practices are related to this practice.

Favor flat Hierarchies
Organize information physically in flat hierarchies. Add views to put these documents in different contexts.
Physical Location
Store information physically only by properties that are invariant.

Resources

For more information regarding this practice please refer to:

Section
Sections of a document are typically part of a document. But the size of sections may vary. To support a team to write collaboratively on the documentation, a larger document may be subdivided into external section documents.
Module
A documentation module is a fragment which is usually transcluded by other documents. The lifetime of a module document is independent of the lifetimes of the documents that reference it.