Document

Documents are very similar to screens regarding the documentation. Both artifacts specify data to be displayed to the user and the visual layout of how the data is presented. Although most documents are read-only, some can also prompt users to enter data (PDF form, for instance), which makes them even closer to screens.

The core part of the documentation is the displayed data. As mentioned in the document artifact antipatterns, documents themselves do not load data, they must receive it in the form of a data object:

The input data is then used for two different purposes, as shown in the following example:

1. Data values which are displayed in the document (Recipient.Name on row 1)
2. Data values which are not displayed in the document but are used to evaluate conditions (Payment.Method on row 7)
   • It defines whether some parts of the document should be visible or not, for conditional formatting, and so on.