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Documentum is highly customizable platform, with a dozen of mouse click’s you may do many things which are often requested by customers. I will describe possible simplest but very often things you can do with the Documentum Application Builder (yep, I remember the times when it was named Developer Studio ) .

Object Type / Object Attribute labels

After you created an object type, which is indispensable for you business and added bunch of very useful attributes, you may want to give user-friendly labels to not shock the end user with something like abc_cat_invoice.

This is really simple, just double click on desired type or attribute and put there any label you want.

But remember you should modify labels for all locales supported by your application, so French speaking users will see labels in French and English speaking in English.

Also there is one more useful TIP. In the DAB view by default not show attributes of the base type, but your customers maybe don’t know what is “Title” or “Name” mean for the Invoice document. To change labels for this attributes select “List all attributes” from the View menu and change label for object_name or subject. Note: Do not change labels for the pure Documentum types, do that only under your type scope.

And not forget to check in your DocApp and restart Application Server.
So as you probably will got the following result

Title picture from here

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I will describe a routine to configure Eclipse IDE to run and debug Documentum Webtop.
First of all you need to download and install some required software like JDK and Apache Tomcat. After that I suggest to perform standalone Webtop installation (or take already deployed webtop from the other location). This is necessary to install all required libraries and dmcl40.dll to the system. Also you need to download Eclipse with Web Tools. Latest release at this moment can be downloaded from here . Use all-in-one link there.

• Unpack content of the wtp-all-in-one-sdk-R-1.5.3-win32.zip somewhere, let’s say d:\java\eclipse.
• Don’t think that default memory config will fit your needs, so add more memory for Eclipse in D:\java\eclipse\eclipse.ini
• Run eclipse.exe and select path for workspace(D:\java\eclipse\workspace) - See Image
• Make sure that Eclipse point to JDK(not JRE) location(menu Window-Preferences) - See Image
• Configure Apache Tomcat Runtime(menu Window-Preferences) - See Image1 Image2 Image3
• Create new Web Project - See Image1 Image2
• Copy previously installed Webtop to D:\java\eclipse\workspace\webtop\WebContent
• Refresh project
• Change project output path - See Image
• Add all libraries from C:\Program Files\Documentum\Shared to Build Path - See Image
• Run project on the Apache Server (menu Run As-Run On Server) - See Image
• Configure Running classpath - See Image

• Add all libraries from C:\Program Files\Documentum\Shared
• Add C:\Documentum\config folder
  

Wow, seems that’s all. If you have some lucky it will work for you. You may start Webtop from Eclipse, or you even may debug your sources. Make sure you are using JDK and Tomcat which is mentioned in the Webtop Release Notes.

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From my experience there are two way to effectively organize supplemental information in Documentum and make it available as a data for the attributes.

The first and the simplest this is create and register table and in the Application Builder setup select from this table as a data source. Then WebTop and Desktop will display drop-down list with the values. This way is acceptable for the small amount of data and the second disadvantage that Documentum hasn’t an effective way to edit this information.

The second way is to create native Documentum document or folder and make a bit customization to populate it as a data for the attribute. I prefer folders because they allow to organize information in a tree, also Webtop has a native component to pickup a folder. So the general flowchart is:

• create base folder/cabinet for the supplemental information
• create a subfolder for each type of information
• fill it

This way has many advantages. You may use folder structure to organize hierarchical data like your organization structure or products list, etc. Also Documentum provide a standard way to edit this information, all you need this is create a foder :). You may decide to create a separate type for each type of data; this will allow you easily link it with the specific icon (many capricious customers ask for this customization). To organize BIG amount of data you may add additional abstract layer to real folder tree. For example use leading letters as a subfolders or years or product category. So you may build your own data tree.

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