Chapter 1. Overview and concepts 7
Documents are identified (indexed) by date, with one or more other fields, such as customer 
name, customer number, or invoice number. A date is optional but highly recommended for 
optimizing document search performance. 
Our example fictitious company, AFinancial Co, prints customer credit card statements 
monthly. This report, the customer credit card statements (Customer Statements), consists of 
thousands of individual customer statements. The company also prints transaction logs 
monthly. This second report, the transaction log (Transaction Report), contains thousands of 
customer transactions per month. The company must load these two reports into Content 
Manager OnDemand so that their data can be stored, then easily searched, retrieved, and 
viewed later. Let us look at how these two large reports might be broken up into individual 
Content Manager OnDemand documents.
Reports are “loaded” into the Content Manager OnDemand system. A Content Manager 
OnDemand application describes how the report will be divided into documents. Figure 1-2 
on page 8 illustrates two reports, their associated Content Manager OnDemand applications, 
and documents. Let us look at how the associated applications divide the reports into Content 
Manager OnDemand documents.
The first report that we look at is the Customer Statements report. For this example, the 
report consists of 63,097 individual customer statements. An administrator can define a 
“Statement application” for this report that breaks up the report into logical documents. The 
Statement application uses the document indexing method to divide the report into 
documents that are based on customer name or customer number. Each statement in the 
report becomes a document in Content Manager OnDemand. Users can retrieve a statement 
by specifying the date and any combination of customer name and number. 
Certain reports might not have a logical way of breaking up into individual documents. For 
example, the Transaction Report is not sorted by customer name or number. The report is 
generated based on the transactions of the day and time, and the customers that are 
associated with the transactions. In this case, we can break up the report into groups of 
pages. An administrator can define a “Trans application” for the report that contains lines of 
sorted transaction data. The Trans application uses the report indexing method to divide the 
report into documents. Each group of 100 pages in the report becomes a document in 
Content Manager OnDemand. Each group is indexed by using the first and last sorted 
transaction values (transaction date and number) that occur in the group. Users can retrieve 
the group of pages that contains a specific transaction number by specifying the date and the 
transaction number. Content Manager OnDemand retrieves the document that contains the 
value that is entered by the user.
To summarize this example, as shown in Figure 1-2 on page 8:
/SM590000Customer Statements report: Contains all customer statements for a month. Customer 
Statements documents: Each customer statement is a document.
/SM590000Transaction Report: Logs all transactions as they occur for a month. Transaction Report 
documents: Every 100 pages of the report are a document.