Document codes provide a way of uniquely identifying documents within an environment. The form of the code is defined by your administrator in ProjectWise Administrator, and can be a combination of a number of attribute fields, with characters used to separate the individual fields.

In addition to defining which fields are used to create the document code, the ProjectWise administrator can apply restrictions to the code. These can be either allow or forbid restrictions.

An Allow restriction limits users to a range of code numbers which the administrator has defined.

A Forbid restriction prevents the user from using a designated range of code numbers.

The administrator can designate a number of allow restrictions and a number of forbid restrictions within these allowed ranges.

In addition to restrictions, which can only be applied and removed by the ProjectWise administrator, users can Reserve document codes. Any user can apply or remove these reservations, so reserved document codes cannot be used until the reservation is removed. A user might for instance be expecting certain documents to be submitted by a subcontractor. He could therefore reserve a range of document code numbers for these documents, remove the reservation when they arrive and apply these codes to the documents. Reserved numbers must lie in the ranges made available by the ProjectWise administrator, allowing for any allow or forbid restrictions that have been applied.

For example, if the document code consisted of an office code (GBR), a Project code (EP1, EP2, and so on), a document/serial number and (optionally) a sheet number, you might create Allow restrictions for GBR - EP1 # 0001 - 1000 and GBR - EP2 # 1001 - 2000. These would restrict document codes to numbers within the range 1 - 1000 for documents relating to the Project EP1 and 1001 - 2000 for documents relating to the Project EP2. All document codes would start with GBR, the office code, and no document codes would be allowed outside these two ranges. If you wanted to reserve the codes GBR - EP1 #500 to #750 for another section of the organization, you could apply a forbid restriction on these codes. Users would then only be able to use the codes GBR - EP1#0001 to #499 and #751 to #1000 or any numbers in the GBR - EP2 range of document codes and could therefor make appropriate reservations if required.

Example: To define a document code to contain the Office code, the Project code, the document number, — GBR-EP1-0001. The document code to be stored in a 'placeholder' — the attribute used to store the product of the combined attributes contained in the defined document code (doc_code)

Document codes are reserved using Document > Attributes > Document Code Reservation.

Document codes are applied to documents using Document > Attributes > Document Code.

The example used to illustrate the principle of applying document codes is drawn from a particular environment created for demonstration purposes. Since both the environment and the document code format are administrator definable, the details for your document codes may be different. The document code format defined for the example consists of an office identifier code - a project identifier code and a serial number. In this example it appears as GBR-ep1-0001.

You can also apply document codes to a number of documents. You can stipulate the range of numbers from which the document codes generate and force the numbers to be in sequence, if required.