On most documents written for Rice client applications, there exists a tab at the bottom of the page, the Notes tab. This allows document editors to attach files to the page or write explanatory notes.

How are these notes supported?

org.kuali.rice.kns.bo.PersistableBusinessObject requires methods to add and programmatically manipulate notes on the object. Therefore, all persisting business objects in client applications support the addition of notes to them. This allows for a great amount of flexibility. A note, represented by objects of class org.kuali.rice.kns.bo.Note, hold both text and links to attachments—as well as the note’s creator and the time it was created. Therefore, such text and attachments can be associated with any persisting business object.

However, most Rice applications use Notes mostly on documents. In this case, the Note is associated with org.kuali.rice.kns.bo.DocumentHeader objects – the header of the document. The kul:notes tag and org.kuali.rice.kns.web.struts.action.KualiDocumentActionBase jointly provide support for adding these kinds of notes.

The use of these notes are also authorized by a number of KIM permissions. Before notes are added, the user is checked for having the KR-NS Add Note / Attachment permission. These permissions should always have a permission attribute associated with document name; optionally, a permission attribute for attachmentTypeCode can be used.

There is also the KR-NS Delete Note / Attachment permission. Two permission attributes are required for this: both the document name, and a record for the createdBySelfOnly attribute (a boolean attribute that may prevent end users from deleting notes created by other end users).

Finally, there is the KR-NS View Note / Attachment permission. Just as with Add Note / Attachment permissions, it requires a document type name and can have an optional attachmentTypeCode.

Note’s attachments are handled by org.kuali.rice.kns.service.AttachmentService. By default, they attempt to move attachments into a directory specified by the attachments.directory configuration property; under that, each object gets its own subdirectory, with the name of the subdirectory based on the objectId of the business object.