Documents Overview

NFIRS 5 Alive has the ability to store three types of documents; NFIRS 5 Alive report text, general text documents and application documents.

NFIRS 5 Alive report text is highly structured text that stores data to assemble animated graphs, numeric arrays, monthly analysis and officer's records. This text has been designed to transfer information electronically without having to expose email systems to the threat of virus infection from attachments.

Normally NFIRS 5 report text is not automatically loaded into Documents. But you can view a report in Presentations and select an option to save the report's text in Documents any time you wish.

NFIRS 5 Alive handles non-structured text files as well. You can easily import any text file into the Documents library. When a text file is imported you will see a preview of the text in the Documents scrolling text area. Nearly any document with the ".txt" extension can be stored in Documents.

Finally, NFIRS 5 Alive can store formatted documents from other applications. These documents can be a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, a Microsoft Word Annual Report or simply any type of document you may wish to retrieve and restore for future use.

NFIRS 5 Alive stores documents based on their type and size. Small-sized text documents (<30K) are stored in the Document record's text field. This is adequate for NFIRS 5 Alive report text as well as many other text files.

Larger text documents and documents from other applications are stored in a BLOB field in NFIRS 5 Alive. BLOB fields are very flexible data fields that have the capacity and flexibility to store, compress and restore a wide range of data types.

If you are storing super-sized files (over 512K), NFIRS 5 Alive will make a copy of the document and store it in its Documents folder. The database will maintain the information necessary to copy the stored document to any folder when you wish to restore it.