Strategies for Organizing Folders

Several factors should be considered when you are setting up the folder hierarchy within a cabinet.

Typically a cabinet is organized through a hierarchy of folders. Administrators can control who can create folders. By default all users have this privilege. Folders can contain other folders, nested to lower levels in the hierarchy. Folders can also contain other repository objects, such as structured documents, DTDs, unstructured files, and so on. Folders have name and description properties that help to identify their contents.

Access Control

By default, folders inherit access controls from their cabinet and folder ancestry. An administrator can apply access controls at a folder level to override those set at its cabinet or containing folder hierarchy, so only authorized users or groups can alter the folder properties, contents, or other characteristics. Objects within the folder hierarchy inherit the access controls applied at the folder level unless explicitly overridden at a lower level.

Project Content

Most organizations organize objects into folders based on the project they support.

Note: When a project is processed by the Astoria Translation Manager, the translated content is stored in a translation cabinet using the folder structure from the source cabinet and folder.

Search Scope

You can limit the scope of a Saved Search or a Basic Search to the contents of a folder and its containing objects or folders.

Filtering Constraints Scope

You can control the scope of filtering constraints that are available to documents residing in a folder. You can also configure the filtering feature to allow filtering constraints in parent folders or at the cabinet or global level to be inherited by documents in a folder.

Object Type

Although a folder can contain many different types of objects, it may be easier for users to work with folders that contain the same type of objects. For example, you may want to store composed output of different types in separate folders. Or you could store all ditaval files in a separate folder.

Note: By default, when you create an edition, all of its objects are stored a separate folder. The folder icon displays an edition decoration (

You can set a property on a folder to indicate it contains mostly graphic file objects. The folder icon displays a graphic decoration (). You can configure the Details View presentation for graphics folders to display thumbnails of the graphics in various sizes, instead of a list of file names.

You may wish to organize other folders to contain other object types, such as DITA maps, or DITA topics. The folder name and optional description helps to identify the types of objects a user can expect to be contained in the folder.

Folder Size

When the number of objects in a folder becomes too large, it becomes cumbersome to navigate or scroll through the list. You can create categories of subfolders and move objects into the lower-level folders.