Documents and Notes

Documents and Notes

Two collaborative editors, for two different jobs. Both are real-time: several people can edit the same thing at once, with presence, backed by Yjs and the Hocuspocus sidecar.

If an editor will not connect, the sidecar is almost always the reason — see External-Services.

Documents

Documents is the formal-output editor: contracts, reports, letters — anything that ends up as a .docx.

It offers:

• DOCX import and export, so a document can start life in Word and go back there
• Tracked changes, with accept/reject
• Comments, threaded, with their own permissions
• Versions — every document keeps a history you can view and restore. A restore restores the content, not just a pointer
• Templates — documents marked as templates, under Documents → Templates

Bindings — live record data in prose

The feature that makes Documents more than a word processor. A binding connects a place in the document to data in the platform, so the text reflects the record rather than a copy of it.

Bindings are marked in the file with AUTONATE_BINDING and AUTONATE_TABLE_BINDING markers, which survive the DOCX round-trip. Those marker names are permanent: renaming them would orphan every bound document, so they are on the do-not-rename list.

A document with bindings can be refreshed to re-pull current values, which is a separate permission from editing — you can let someone refresh a document without letting them rewrite it.

Notes and pages

Notes is the informal side: working notes, documentation, internal wiki-ish content. Rich text, collaborative, quick.

It has a hierarchy, which is worth learning because permissions follow it:

Project → Cabinet → Notebook → Page → Note

• Projects are the top-level container, and have members.
• Cabinets and notebooks organise within a project.
• Pages hold content; notes are the individual pieces.

Documents use a parallel, simpler hierarchy: Project → Folder → Document, with folders nesting inside each other.

Both hierarchies share the same authorization plumbing, so a grant on a project or folder flows down to what it contains, and an override can be applied at any level.

Pages also support

• Versions, with restore
• Attachments — uploaded files, served with hardened content-type handling rather than echoing whatever the uploader claimed
• Sharing — a page can be shared beyond its normal audience

Permission overrides

Content is where the permission model earns its keep. Beyond roles and grants, content supports explicit overrides on a specific project, folder, notebook or document — allow or deny, applied to that node and inherited by its descendants.

Typical uses:

• a contributor role for a single project, without granting it globally
• a comment-only collaborator: can view and comment, cannot edit
• a deny on one sensitive folder inside an otherwise-shared project

The Permission Checker (see Administration) will explain the resulting decision, including which override produced it.

Querying notes

The Notes AQL entity exposes notes to Queries-and-Dashboards, which is how you build "what changed this week" style views without clicking through the tree.