Data sheet documents are used to store a snapshot of the data sheet that will ultimately be publishable to the warehouse. Previously, the only way to publish a data sheet was to create a data sheet and publish it immediately. It is not possible to circulate a data sheet for review and then publish it if it was approved. This is because if you look at a data sheet and decide it contains the data that you want to publish, you cannot determine if someone else altered the underlying data since you opened and populated the data sheet.
The data sheet document snapshot provides a way for the engineer to take a snapshot of the data at a particular point in time and publish that data for other tools to use.
The data sheet documents provided in the authoring layer automatically reserve revisions in the warehouse. This means that the authoring tool and the warehouse maintains the same revision details when the document is published. The reserving of revisions is controlled by the presence of the ISPFAuthPublishableDocumentRevision interface. In the delivered model, the interface is a required realizes, so the functionality is available by default.
The workflow for using the data sheet documents is as follows:
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Find the relevant tag, and right-click it. An option is available to Create Document for IPD from the IPRCProcessInstrument interface. This creates a new document and relates it to the tag.
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The snapshot is then created from the shortcut menu for the document.
An ENS definition determines the name of the data sheet document, based on the name
of the related tag.
This create method is based on the CreateClassObjAndRelWithPropertyOverrides client API. This API is the same as CreateClassObjAndRel. See CreateClassObjAndRel in Classified Object Model for a description of the other arguments.
The difference with this API is that argument 10 (property overrides) is used for setting properties on named interfaces.
In this case, we are defining the Tool ID property to be stamped on the ISPFAuthPublishable interface and the SPFDatasheetDocType property to be stamped on the ISPFDatasheetDocRevision interface.
The argument takes the form InterfaceDef.PropertyDef.Value; if there is more than one, they are separated by a tilde (~).
The API also takes argument 4 (the relationship definition to related object) and records it in a property on the data sheet revision so the snapshot command can derive how to get back to the IPD tag, along with the base functionality of creating the relationship between the object that the method is on and the object being created.
The method also defines the classification of the document, which must match the classification that the TEFPublished document (the reserved revisions) will take on.