Conditions form the part of an event rule that controls which documents or records fall under a path, and therefore, the policy.
A condition is analogous to a true-or-false question. If the answer to the question is true, the document or records falls under the path. If the result is false, the document or record does not fall under the path. Conditions are applied one at a time to each document or record in Retention Policy Designer to determine whether the document or record belongs in the path.
You must understand the order in which Retention Policy Designer evaluates event rule conditions. The clause that you choose AND or OR, and the grouping of the conditions determine the order in which Retention Policy Designer evaluates the rule conditions. If all of your conditions are connected by AND operators, you can leave them ungrouped. For policies that include OR operators, Retention Policy Designer always begins evaluation with the condition in the innermost (nested) parentheses.
The following example shows AND operators:
Drawer is equal to Approved Contracts AND Field1 is equal to Region 2 AND Submit Date is greater than 2010.
In this example, all conditions must be evaluated to determine if the document or record will be added to the path. No grouping is necessary because if any condition evaluates to false, the document or record is skipped.
The following example shows AND and OR operators grouped:
Drawer is equal to Approved Contracts OR Field1 is equal to Region 2 AND Submit Date is greater than 2010.
Grouped: ((Drawer is equal to Approved Contracts OR Field1 is equal to Region 2) AND Submit Date is greater than 2010).
In this example, grouping ensures that the OR clause is evaluated first. If the condition evaluates to false for a given document or record, the remaining AND condition is ignored, and the document or record is skipped. If the condition evaluates to true, the remaining AND condition is evaluated. If the AND condition evaluates to true, the document or record is placed in the path. Otherwise, the document or record is skipped.
The following example shows AND and OR operators grouped:
Grouped: (Drawer is equal to Approved Contracts) OR (Field1 is equal to Region 2 AND Submit Date is greater than 2010).
In this example, if the AND clause evaluates to true for a given document or record, the condition is satisfied. Therefore, the first condition before the OR is ignored, and the document or record is placed in the path. If the AND clause evaluates to false, the first condition is evaluated. If the first condition evaluates to true, the document or record is placed in the path. Otherwise, the document or record is skipped.