Vault Copy Design – The Category Assignment Cheat

So I am always nervous about giving away solutions or tips which perhaps drive "unintended" usage of product features, when we make future enhancement decisions these have a habit of no longer working, but this behavior I hope will actually become better integrated in the product over time so worthwhile sharing as a "cheat" now.

On the face of things we really have 2 options for file category assignment in Copy Design, by not resetting Category name in your copy design rules the source file Category, lifecycle scheme and revision scheme are copied.  If we reset, the new file will use your general Category Rules to apply a new category, lifecycle and revision – what though if you want to assign copied files to a new category all together, with different behaviors to files created from scratch?  Well, read on. 

As discussed in previous posts, we launched Vault Copy Design with a small number of property mapping options, some of these not so popular with a few of you out there (I'm talking the default Remove iLogic Rules), but our hope is to expand upon property editing in Copy Design over time providing better control over new file details.

One thing we can do now though is start to impact category assignment via copy design by getting a little creative with this very property: Remove iLogic Rules.

This is where the "Remove iLogic Rules" property comes into it – this mapping is simply a set text string "Remove", when we map to the iLogic Rules property in a file the presence of the "Remove" text string means iLogic Rules are removed, but the fact that the value is set (unlike User or File Name properties which vary from file to file) we can easily map this to another file property and predictably use this to set a category assignment rule.  

The example we use in the video below is Keywords, but we can target any unused file property and even create multiple outcomes based on the mapped value.  To summarize what we see in the video:

1. Create a rule in Vault Category Rules that if file property "Keywords" contains “Remove” assign to "Copied File" Category
2. Go to Copy Design and create a new Copy Design rule for copied files
3. Create a behavior mapping for all files where "Keywords" Set Value As “Remove iLogic Rules”
4. Additionally set "Category Name" to Reset
5. Now copy a file

You will first see the default rule behaviors taking on the source file behaviors, when we use the copied files rule, the string "Remove" is added to Keywords and on add to Vault the file will be categorized as a "Copied File".

By adding additional mappings to different file properties and creating new category assignment rules any number of category assignment results are possible.

So there you go – a quick cheat for those wanting to get a little more flexibility from their category assignment.

Allan