External documents

Not everything you have to control is something you wrote. Supplier terms, a certificate, a regulator's notice, a signed contract, a manual from a vendor — you did not author the content and you must not change it, but it still has to sit in the record with an owner, a version and an approval behind it. That is an external document.

An external document is a file Alchex controls rather than text Alchex edits. Everything else about it — owner, reference code, versions, review, activity log, archive — works exactly as it does for an authored document.

Adding one

Drag a PDF onto the Governance page. The tip on the page says it plainly: DOCX, Markdown or PDF — one document per file. Word and Markdown files convert into editable documents; a PDF becomes an external document instead. You can drop up to 20 files at once, each up to 25 MB.

In the import queue, set the Document type for each file — Policy, Procedure, Form, Record, Manual or Document — then choose Import. There is no metadata dialog. Alchex creates the document immediately with sensible defaults:

Uploading needs Author rights or higher on the team; the app refuses with Author role or higher required to upload documents. See Permissions.

Alchex checks the bytes, not the file extension. A renamed file that is not really a PDF is rejected with Not a valid PDF file, and anything over the size limit is refused before it is stored.

The file is fixed, and provable

At upload Alchex records a SHA-256 fingerprint of the exact bytes and stores the file once, never overwriting it. The properties rail shows this on two rows:

• Source — External file · PDF
• File — the file size and the first characters of the fingerprint

That fingerprint is the integrity anchor for every later approval of that version. It is what lets you say, years later, that the file an approver signed off is byte-for-byte the file readers are downloading.

Reading it

Instead of the editor, an external document opens an inline viewer with page numbers and Zoom in, Zoom out and Fit width. If the file is slow to arrive you will see Loading file…; if something goes wrong, Could not load the file with a Retry.

Viewing links are short-lived by design — they expire after a few minutes, and the app quietly fetches a fresh one rather than handing out a permanent URL.

Review and publishing

External documents go through the same route as everything else: draft → submit → approve → publish. See Submit and approve.

Two differences are worth knowing:

• The approver reviews the file, not a text diff. The approval screen shows the document itself. Where a version supersedes an earlier file, it names that file and its fingerprint, so the decision is recorded against a specific replacement.
• There is no change summary. Authored documents get an added / removed / modified block count. For a file, that number would be meaningless, so Alchex does not invent one.

Who can download which version

This is stricter than most people expect, and deliberately so:

• The published version's file is available to anyone who can read the document.
• Any other version — a past version, or an upload still waiting for approval — additionally requires Author rights. A plain reader who tries gets Only the published version is available to you.

So an unapproved file cannot leak to readers just because the document is visible to them.

Replacing the content

There is no replace-file action. If the underlying document is reissued, archive the existing one and upload the new file as a new document. The archived record stays intact, readable and auditable, so the history of what was in force is never lost — see Activity and archive.

Related

• Creating documents — the other path, for content you write yourself.
• Exporting documents — getting the original file back out.
• Version history — every uploaded file, in order.