Attached Documents

Summary

Umana offers the possibility of attaching documents to a variety of records in the data base. These are typically employee records (i.e. records with a _PERSID field), but not necessarily. You might want to attach documents to a benefit plan, for example.

Documents are attached using _DOCS fields. That field contains the link; the actual documents are stored elsewhere. (Just where is discussed below.) Document are also listed in the DOCCAT database table.

For example, the PERS file (table, to use SQL terminology) has

E_PERSID : Employee number field
E_DOCS : Main documents field

User access

The basic objective is this:

If a user has read access to the record (more precisely, to the _DOCS field in the record), then he has read access to the documents attached.
If a user has write access to the record, he can add, delete, and update documents attached.

Adding and retrieving documents

To add a document, the user must have access to the source file. He selects the employee's record in question, and drags the file to the Umana record.
To view a document, the user selects the record, clicks on the documents field on the form. That shows him a list of attached documents. He picks the document he wants and extracts (and possibly then) opens it.

The "document store"

There are two places that documents can be physically kept in Umana. This is configurable.

In a directory on your server – all documents a single folder you configure
In the data base in a BLOB field – managed by SQL server

Document files are not encrypted nor compressed by Umana, and apparently compression does not work well in SQL-server for BLOB objects.

In either case, there are two important considerations: Security, and Backup.

Backup

When document are stored in folder, then you have to be sure that the folder is backed up. An incremental back-up would probably be fine.
When they are stored in the data base, that increases the size of the data base for backup. (I'm not sure how SQL-server manages this - Tom.)

Security

When documents are stored in a folder, you will probably want special security it that folder. Otherwise anyone who has access to any documents needs access to that folder, and using Windows explorer that user effectively has access to all documents. Unless access to Umana is very limited, this will be a problem. Umana has a solution, below.
When documents are store in the data base, Umana handles the extraction and insertion into the data base.

Protecting the HRDOCS folder

If you opt for putting documents in a folder (let's call it HRDOCS), then you will want to protect it. Here's how:

Create a special USERID in your Active Directory. Let's call it HRDOCSUSER. Create a password that doesn't expire.
Set the security for the HRDOCS folder so that only HRDOCSUSER (and your backup process user, like SYSTEM) have access to it. The normal UMANA users will not need access to it.
Create a ..\CARVER\DOCS subdirectory of the user's %TEMP% directory. (The temp directory that Umana uses may be a different directory. See CONFIG.FPW for that configuration.) Give access to this directory to the user himself and also to HRDOCSUSER. This is the transfer directory which both users can access.
In CARVER.INI you will need entries:

DocumentsPath=W:\HRDOCS && The documents directory

DocumentsUser=HRDOCSUSER && The special Windows UserId

DocumentsPassword=<the-encrypted-password>

Email us (support@umana.ca) the password for HRDOCSUSER and we will send you back the encrypted version to put into CARVER.INI

CARVER.INI with documents in the data base

For storing document in your data base, just put into CARVER.INI :
DocumentsPath=* instead of directory name.

How Umana works

When documents in an protected folder, Umana uses the RUNAS Windows API copy document to and from the transfer folder TEMP\CARVER\DOCS.