projectdoc Toolbox

The main body of a document is divided into sections. Besides the sections defined by a doctype, an author may add any number of additional sections. Sections that are regularly added to a given doctype should be added to the doctype's template.

Level of Experience

Document sections are typically rendered with the Section Macro. This not only allows to not render a section with an empty body, it also allows to transclude information easily.

Common Sections

The following sections are typically found in all document instances. The contents of the document is usually added after the description section with one (or more) level one headers. Please refer to Headings for more information on this topic.

Description

The description section of a document informs about its content and intention. This is a descriptive abstract, similar to a table of contents, and a longer form of the Short Description document property.

The description helps potential readers to decide, whether or not relevant information can be found in the document.

 

Some document types may interpret this property different. A Glossary Item for instance, puts the definition of the term in the description section. A Role describes the role instead of describing what the intention of a particular role document instance is.

Since the location of this section typically makes the intention of the text obvious, the section title may be hidden. For more information please refer to No need to render the Section Title in Tips.

Summary

Summarize the key findings or essential information of the document. This is the informative abstract, while a Description contains the descriptive abstract.

The summary helps readers to get informed about the key points in a short section. It is also a tool to help readers of the document to recall the contents without scanning the whole document.

Documents

The contents of the Documents section is typically a query that lists all documents that reference this document instance by name.

The section is typically part of documents that are types or generic types (like categories or tags). The listing is created by the use of the Display Table Macro, while the references on the documents to this document instance are generated with the Name List Macro, Tag List Macro, or Name Body List Macro.

To non-type document types this section is usually not applied.

Children

It is often helpful to organize documents in a hierarchical manner. For some document types there is a natural hierarchy.

 

Roles, for instance, may be divided in team and user roles. The team role may be subdivided into testers, architects and developers. Developers may be further split into front-end, service and storage developers. Define the roles as they fit to your project.

To list the children, use the Display Table Macro. Consider using the list representation, if you only want to show the name and short description. This representation is usually shorter and easier to read.

 

Some document types may have different names for this section. The are typically called subordinate elements of a given doctype like "Subordinate Topics" or "Subordinate Roles".

Document types may add additional sections selecting child documents of other document types or selection criteria.

Notes

These are internal notes that are usually not exported and only visible to team members with write access.

But this is not a safe place to store sensible information. It is just a convenience for the reader to not be bothered with notes stored here for the authors for later use. The security level is about suppressing the representation by a CSS style. Therefore consider this as a convenience for the reader, not as a security tool.

 

The text of notes sections is also indexed.

References

For a document the references section contains pointers to resources that prove the statements of the document.

Often these proofs are not easily distinguishable from further information. In this case you may want to skip the reference section in favour for the resource list.

 

For further information please refer to References and Resources.

Resources

The resources section provides references to further information to the topic of the document.

This may be information on the internet provided by the resource or information in the team's information systems. Anything the reader of the resource might want to know, may be listed here.

 

For further information please refer to References and Resources.