Custodian Objects

One may be used to listing custodians only in a separate field in a database. Each document has a custodian listed in a separate metadata field.

Relativity gives you the ability to create a custodian object which will not only hold the custodian name but also list other data associated with the custodian such as his or her email address, phone number, department, title and so forth.

In order to create a new object, you must have admin rights. Under the Object tab, an admin will have the ability to create a new object type.

It's important to select Workspace as the Parent Object Type if you want to use the Custodian object for multiple documents.

Notice the option to 'Copy instances On Workspace Creation". This controls whether the object will be copied when one uses its workspace as a basis for a new workspace. The setting 'Enable Snapshot Auditing' controls whether or not Relativity keeps a record of changes that are made to the object. You certainly also want to enable sampling and pivot charts for a field like this.

The custodian object will be a Relativity Dynamic Object (RDO), one the user creates, as opposed to a system object, one that is built into the application. A layout and view for the custodian object will automatically be created.

Before creating new fields to add to the object, you'll want to make sure that you can select an object type for each field. Confirm that the object type is available for the All Fields and All Layouts views. This is necessary so that this object type can be set to 'Custodian' when you create fields for the Custodian object. Some fields will be created automatically when the object is created.

In order to set up a one to many relationship between the custodian object and the document object (so each document can only have one custodian), you should create a field named, 'Custodian' that has 'Document ' as the object type; the field type as 'single object' and 'Custodian' as the associative object type. Set the Linked field to 'Yes'.

On the layouts tab you'll then want to edit the 'Custodian' object layout that was created automatically, so all of the fields you want are displayed. After clicking 'Build Layout' you'll be able to drag and drop fields into place.

Under Tabs, an admin will be able to determine whether an object is visible in the tab strip, and set it to be the default tab if necessary.