Categories and reference catalogs are types of custom properties in an AODocs document. Learn more: Create and configure custom properties.
Categories and reference catalogs are composed of a set of values, for example, a list of electronic products or countries. Users can select from the predefined category values in a drop-down list when a document is in edit mode.
Categories are defined at the library level. Library administrators can create and configure categories. Category value managers can configure categories once they've been created by an administrator. Learn more: What are roles?
Reference catalogs are defined at the domain level, so are available in all libraries on your domain. AODocs super administrators can set up reference catalogs on the domain via API. Once reference catalogs are set up, library administrators can create and configure properties, called Reference Catalog properties, at the document class level.
Categories and reference catalogs can be assigned to several custom properties in the same document class or to different document classes. Learn more: Assign an existing category to a new property.
Categories and reference catalogs can be mandatory, hidden or have multiple values. Learn more: Configure custom property settings.
Category values can have several hierarchical sublevels. For example, the category Country may have three sublevels: Region, Country and City/Town.
Reference catalogs are always single-level. They cannot have sublevels like categories.
A list of category values can be dynamic. This means that contributors can add new values to the predefined list. Alternatively, the list can be frozen and contributors can only select values from the predefined list.
Reference catalogs are never dynamic. Only super administrators can add values to reference catalogs.
Library administrators can set category values as outdated. Outdated values are not available for selection in the list of values.
Reference catalog values can't be set as outdated.