As old as Notes itself, doclinks are a cornerstone of collaboration within the Notes/Domino architecture, streamlining navigation and enhancing productivity. Commonly used in emails, rich text fields, and throughout Notes documents, doclinks have played a pivotal role in fostering efficient communication and collaboration for decades.
Since doclinks have been, and continue to be, deeply integrated into application workflows, it is crucial to ensure they are properly handled during the export/archive/migration process. These links often provide invaluable connections to referenced data, which can be essential for maintaining the integrity and usability of archived content. With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at a few key aspects and considerations to keep in mind when creating archives or migrating data with Teamstudio Export.
How Does Export Handle Doclinks?
Teamstudio Export ensures that doclinks are preserved and remain fully functional in both PDF and HTML archives, enabling seamless navigation between linked documents. For generated archives, Teamstudio Export uses UNIDs (Universal IDs) to manage doclinks, creating and maintaining an index that translates UNIDs into file names to maintain link functionality. This approach ensures that even in static formats like PDF or HTML, the interconnected structure of Notes databases is preserved, making it simple and efficient for users to explore archived content.
Generated UNID index within the DXL archive helps facilitate doclink functionality.
What About External Doclinks?
When it comes to cross-database doclinks, Teamstudio Export requires additional steps to ensure these links remain functional in the archived HTML or PDF formats. Specifically, both the source and target databases must be archived to XML before creating the final PDF or HTML export. This is because cross-database doclinks rely on references that need to be resolved during the export process. Without creating the XML archives for both applications, the links will not function properly, breaking the connection between the documents. By ensuring all linked databases are included in the archive, Export maintains the integrity of these external doclinks, allowing users to navigate between related content across multiple databases.
If you’re not familiar with how Teamstudio Export works, you should know that it’s a two-step process: first exporting the native Notes database to XML format, then converting from XML to PDF, HTML or other formats. So it’s important to create the XML archives of all related databases that use doclinks before converting to the final format.
How Does Export Handle Embedded Views Doclinks?
Teamstudio Export provides support for embedded views in both PDF and HTML archives, ensuring that these elements are accurately represented in the exported formats. For HTML archives, Export creates a visual representation of the embedded views, allowing users to interact with and navigate the data as they would in the original Notes environment. Similarly, in PDF archives, embedded views are rendered as static representations, preserving the structure and content of the view.
However, a key consideration is that the embedded view must originate from the same database being archived. If the embedded view references another database, that database must also be archived to XML before any HTML or PDF exports are created to ensure the view data is available. This functionality ensures that even complex Notes applications with embedded views can be effectively archived and doclinks accessed in the static archive formats.
Doclinks are preserved within embedded views in both HTML archives (Left) and PDF archives (Right).
Additional Considerations
When exporting applications containing doclinks that reference one another, it’s important to ensure that these applications remain accessible to each other once on the hosting platform. For example, if the data are being migrated to a platform like Microsoft SharePoint, the linked applications should be hosted within the same document library or a similarly accessible structure. This ensures that the doclinks continue to function as intended, preserving the relationships between documents and maintaining the usability of the migrated content.
Another important factor to consider is your data archive or migration strategy in relation to data retention policies. If you choose to separate your application’s data sets into different archives based on retention requirements—such as hosting certain archives that will be deleted after a specific time—you risk breaking doclink relationships and functionality. This could compromise the interconnected nature of your application data. To avoid this, carefully plan how your data is segmented across archives and ensure that critical doclink relationships are preserved, even when retention policies are applied.
Teamstudio Export provides robust support for handling doclinks, ensuring that the interconnected nature of HCL Notes/Domino applications is preserved. By maintaining functional doclinks both within the same database and for cross-database links through proper archiving or migration of all related applications, Export maintains navigation and data accessibility once within the archived or migrated formats. This allows organizations to retain the usability and context of their Notes applications, making Export an invaluable tool for preserving the integrity of doclink relationships within legacy systems once migrated to their archived states.