Understanding navigation views

A navigation view is a multi-level graphical view of the contents of a vault. A navigation view looks and acts like Windows Explorer except that, instead of showing documents organized into folders where they reside, it shows documents organized according to the property values of the documents themselves. Navigation views make documents easier to find when users know information about documents other than their folder locations. For example, if a user is looking for all documents related to a specific manufacturer but the vault folder structure is organized according to a manufacturing plant’s physical layout, the user will have difficulty finding all of the documents, which may be located throughout the vault in various folders. The user could perform a search, but a navigation view would be faster, easier to use, and would not place as much of a load on the Meridian server.

A vault can have any number of navigation views. Navigation views can be configured with

• Any combination of property values
• Different icons for each view level
• Document type filters that restrict view contents to specific document types
• Property filters that restrict view contents to specific property values
• Different columns related to the view’s configuration

These features make navigation views a powerful solution for finding documents for a variety of user requirements. Navigation views are particularly well suited to finding documents using hierarchical information. Each level of the information hierarchy can correspond to a folder level in the view. As users open each level of the view, they are presented with subfolder choices that represent a subset of the current level’s information.

Every vault contains the following default views, most of which you can edit, delete, or use as examples for your own designs.