Understanding document ownership

A central concept in the GCF is the notion of document ownership, which prevents conflicting updates on multiple sites. In a group of collaborating vaults, one and only one of the vaults can be the owner of a document at a specified point in time. A document can be changed only if the local vault owns it. In the other vaults in the group, the document is locked.

Ownership is a property of an individual document in the vault. This means that for a 3D CAD assembly, which consists of many documents, ownership of different parts can be in different vaults.

During the lifetime of a document, ownership of it can be transferred from one vault to another.

The GCF allows ownership both to be pushed to another vault (the vault currently owning the document takes the initiative to transfer ownership) or to be pulled from another vault (a vault requests ownership from the vault that currently owns the document).

The locking of documents is implemented using the check-out mechanism of the briefcase. When the local vault transfers ownership of a document, the GCF will check out the document to a briefcase. In the vault receiving the ownership, the GCF will check in the document from the received briefcase to unlock the document and make it available for editing.