Replication of documents in multi-layer replication networks
Opening a document for editing when the document is not owned by the local site prompts the user to confirm whether to request ownership from the current owner. Moreover, if the user is working on a replica server whose master does not have the ownership, the master server requests the ownership from its master server. This continues all the way to the root database server, until the ownership has been found. If servers are offline, the user is notified about this and the documents will be available after the COS servers have been properly replicated.
Example
In the picture below, the root server has two branches of replica servers.
The user of a replica server in branch 2 performs Request Ownership to get the ownership of a document, but the document has already been requested to branch 1, so the user is notified that the root server does not have the ownership. Therefore, the user must ask the replica site in branch 1 to perform Relinquish Ownership, so that the ownership would be returned to the root server and then be requested to branch 2.
Note: Relinquish Ownership returns the document back to the level it was originally requested from, so in a multi-layer replication network more than one replica site might need to relinquish the ownership before it is returned to the root server.
When a replica server saves a document to COS with Save & Update or Check In, the document file sets are replicated upwards in the replication network. The uploading is automatic all the way up to the root server, as long as all the servers in the chain are configured to replicate automatically and the servers are online. In the document browser dialog, you can select multiple documents and update them by selecting Update Drawing to Master from the context menu. Once the file sets are replicated, the document can be browsed in its current state with the Browse command, at all sites above the replica site where the save to COS was made. This allows the users at the root server to browse all documents in the replication network.