Limitations in Global Support for Linked Documents

When creating a new location with allocated databases the linked documents will not be transferred. These will require a forced Synchronization after the location has been configured and initialised.

Global does not delete linked documents at the remote location when the linked document has been marked with LNKPRP DELE.

Offline transfer is not supported.

Linked documents propagation does not guarantee consistency between files at different locations. In particular:-

• Linked documents functionality is primarily intended for files which are part of the data model, such as PDF Plotfiles, and certain Marine files;

• Linked documents are not definitely linked to the database which references them. It is therefore difficult to track such documents once the link description is no longer available.

• Likewise linked documents may be referenced multiple times. This will be the norm for extract databases. This makes it difficult to identify the primary location of a document.

• It is possible to reference Linked documents for other data types of documents, such as Word documents and Excel spread sheets;

• It is possible for users to change documents at the destination location; this will lead to an inconsistency between locations. The update process does not detect this.

• Behaviour for extract hierarchies may not be as expected. For this reason the FORCE option should be used with caution on databases in an extract hierarchy, since it could overwrite the wrong version of the file.

• No documents are deleted when a database is de-allocated. For this reason ALLOCATE will always overwrite any pre-existing files.

• There is a strong likelihood that ‘orphan’ linked documents will be left behind after databases have been merged, backtracked, de-allocated or deleted.