Article published on the 30th of April 2020.
Contents
1. Introduction
The Numerator Service enables you to provide a unique ID for all new documents, tasks, emails, etc. created on a business module.
This feature is great for providing entities, documents, e-mails and many other items with unique identifiers. This can greatly help in identifying where items belong, as well as granting overview of items. The number sequences used with this service can also be customized to contain information such as the name of the parent of the entity (e.g. the company of a project), and the day, month and year of the creation of the item, and many more properties.
A use case could be a company that works with a lot of different projects and documents. Projects can be outfitted with a unique automatically generated ID, which can also be used on associated documents, in order to e.g. easily know which documents belong to which projects.
2. End User Guide
In the list of Projects on the solution, we have created two projects for the "Advanced Bicycles" company. These can be viewed in the "Projects" list of the solution:
The numerator service that is enabled for the Projects business module works when creating a new project:
1. Click the "New" button on the Projects list to create a new project.
As an example, the following project is created:
2. The project is given a title of "Design of Bike0106".
3. The Company of the project is set to "Advanced Bicycles".
4. All other settings are left blank, and the "Save" button is used to finalize the creation of the project.
5. As can be seen from the Projects list, the new project is given a Project ID based on the numerator service settings we configured in section 3.1.
Another example is shown below. Here a sequence has been set up to create a unique document ID for each document on every project. The ID consists of the title of the project that the document is associated with (in this case "Design of Bike0075"), and a number:
The result is that documents are easy to keep track of, and it is easy to identify which project a given document belongs to:
3. Notes
As exemplified previously, many different properties can be used in the mask of a number sequence. Typically used ones are:
| Mask name | Property |
|---|---|
| [DD] | Current day |
| [MM] | Current month |
| [YYYY] | Current year (can be [YY]) |
| [#] | The value of "Next number" is inserted in this property of the mask (can have as many '#' as needed) |
| [Title] | The title of the entity on which the item is created |
| [wpParent] | Title of the parent business module of the created item. Other fields from the business module can be used, such as [Title] (title of the entity on which the item is created) |
| String of characters | A string of characters can be used in the mask. E.g. "Project-[YYYY]-[##]" could result in "Project-2019-01" |
The numerator service is typically used for providing unique IDs to entities, such as projects or cases, or for individual documents.
3.1. Keep document number on move
As previously mentioned, it is possible to set up the numerator service to make documents keep their assigned numerator service ID through the "Move" function in WorkPoint. This is done by checking the following checker:
If the above checker is checked, documents moved from a document library on one business module to a document library on another business module will keep it's assigned numerator service ID.
Be advised that keeping document number on move works ONLY if the start and end location for the document(s) share the same numerator service number sequence.
Consider the following diagram:
If the "Keep document number on move" checker is checked, documents moved in e.g. the way indicated by the arrows will keep their numerator service ID through the move.
Other examples exist, but a general rule is that if two libraries utilize the same numerator service number sequence, documents can be moved between these and keep their numerator service ID.
Be advised that this does not work if copying an item from one location to another. Copying items always grants the item a new numerator service ID.
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