Creating a "compound" document

Using Mayan EDMS Questions
1

Have been waiting for a project to come along to try Mayan EDMS, ever since seeing in the Turnkey Linux repo library a couple of years ago. Bought the book last night and skimmed it all, reading the first 55 pages pretty intently. A great resource and I think very intuitive and succinct.

Situation

  • creating an educational testing document store, where “question” is our basic “document”
  • question must have problem_image, question_text_image, answer_choices[0 to 7], correct answer flag
  • assets will be created by workers uploading screen clips of problem_image and question_text_image
  • I think having editor-specific watch folders can help make that work
  • answer choices could be copied / pasted in as metadata by the editor

Impetus:
Because we are translating these questions among different languages AND developing variants of some, Mayan EDMS has many, many workflow features that we think will ROCK for us. That plus we want a system that is professional and Mayan is that.

Issue:

  • our question = a “compound” document in our parlance. What is the Mayan way to say that?
  • my first inclination of having everything magically appear in one “document” doesn’t seem feasible
  • are we better off having 3 documents, where one = input a, second = input b, and third = combination of a + b + metadata = questions?

Question: What is the Mayan way to approach this problem – I want to orient myself (and the team) properly so we embrace the philosophy and solve this?

Many thanks for thoughts and feedback!

2

Thanks for the kind feedback.

I’m don’t fully understand your goal so these suggestions might not be a solution for you:

  • You can use the document metadata to track the answers for a question document.

  • To modify the document, editor can upload single pages and then use either document file actions to do an automatic append or create.

  • Create new empty versions and the use page remapping to compose a virtual document version that is custom selection of pages from the document file page pool.

Using versions and page remapping has the advantage of allowing work to start even when the complete translations are not yet finished. You can replace the questions, images, and answer pages are they come along.

The number of versions a document can have are unlimited. You can also use document versions to keep all the translations of a question document in a single unit.

Mayan also allows version re-composition from different file formats. The first page can come from a PDF, the second from an image, the answer page from an office document. Version can also be exported allowing you to have an offline PDF document that is a collapsed file for a Mayan virtual document.