The Document Factory is based on the following concepts:

BSCW Document Set

The BSCW Document Set (or Document Set for short) is a special folder which provides the specific action "Evaluate" and has specific attributes, the BSCW entities (see below). In general, it also contains special documents, the BSCW Templates. If a BSCW Document Set folder contains folders, these folders inherit the "Evaluate" action and also the feature to specify BSCW entities.

BSCW Template

A BSCW Template (or Template for short) is a template for the creation of a document in a Document Set. A template usually consists of text in which references to BSCW Entities or references to other BSCW Templates are imbedded. There are two classes of BSCW Templates: templates of the first class directly create a document during the evaluation process (see below); templates of the second class indirectly contribute to the creation of a document because they are referenced from other templates.

BSCW Entity

A BSCW Entity (or Entity for short) is a variable which can be used within the templates of a document set. Such a variable can be a short term like a name, a directory path or version number. It may be also be a text section to be used as a headline, a paragraph or even the complete text of a web page. BSCW Entities are defined within templates or as attributes of a Documents Set or of folders contained in a Document Set.

Functions

Templates or entity definitions may also contain calls of a few functions where the result of the function call is a text string. For example, the size of a document can be automatically inserted in a document during the evaluation process by calling the function which returns the file size as a text string.

Evaluation Process

An evaluation process can be applied to the objects contained in a Document Set. In general, one or more documents are created by the evaluation process by taking one or more templates and replacing references to entities or other templates and function calls by their respective values, possibly recursively until all references and function calls are resolved.