Basic concepts
The Document Generator is based on the following concepts:
Document set
The document set is a special folder which provides the action 
and has specific attributes, the entities (see below). In general,
it also contains special documents, the templates. When a BSCW
document set folder contains subfolders, these folders inherit the entities of
the document set. Also, new entities may be specified and the
action may be carried out.
Template
A template serves
as a document creation template within a document set. A template usually
consists of text into which references to entities or references to other
templates are embedded. There are two classes of templates: templates of
the first class directly create a document during the evaluation
process (see below); templates of the second class indirectly contribute to
the creation of a document because they are referred to by other templates.
Entity
An entity is a variable with a name and a
value which may be used within the templates of a document set. Such an
entity may stand for a simple notion like a name, a directory path or a version
number. But it may also stand for a headline, a paragraph or even the complete
text of a Web page. Entities are defined within templates or as attributes of a
document set or one of its subfolders.
Function
Templates
or entity definitions may also contain calls of a few functions that return text
strings. E.g., the size of a document can be automatically inserted into a
document during the evaluation process by calling the function which returns the
file size as a text string.
Evaluation
process
An
evaluation process may be applied to the objects contained in a document set. In
general, one or more documents are created during the evaluation process by
taking one or more templates and replacing references to entities or other
templates and function calls by their respective values – possibly recursively –
until all references and function calls are resolved.