The first part of this article discussed the basic design andarchitecture for an intranet document management system. In this concludingpart, get to the good stuff with a discussion of the "check in" and "checkout" process, and add a simple search engine to the system.
In the first part of this article, I explained my rationale for an application I like to call The Vault, a centralized document management system which uses different types of permissions to protect access to group documents. I then spent some time building a wish list of features that I would like the application to support, followed by an explanation of the rules required to govern the system, and of the document check-in/check-out process I plan to use (modeled on the techniques employed by source-control systems like CVS)
With all the theory out of the way, I then proceeded to design a database schema that supported my feature set and rules, and also wrote a few scripts designed to simplify user interaction with the system. However, I did not write the most important scripts - those that take care of actually checking documents in and out of the system - or discuss the revision history mechanism.
I plan to address both these items, and a few more, over the next few pages. So keep reading.
This article copyright Melonfire 2001. All rights reserved.
