Structuring your clauses
An important factor is how to shape the content of your clauses. This consideration essentially comes down to the question whether you will primarily use the Q&A mode or the Assemble Document mode for the document.
If you are primarily using Q&A mode to highly automate several key documents that are used by business users, it is generally good practice to provide a high level of intelligence for individual clauses in the form of clause- and text enabling conditions so that you can switch between alternative clauses and sentences at the click of a button. Since the focus for your organisation is more on the (business) users using your questionnaires, only the advanced users maintaining and updating the clauses need to be able to interact with the clauses “under the hood”.
If the emphasis of your organisation’s use of Clause9 is on Assemble Document mode, then you should focus on creating and structuring clauses in a way that they are very easy to interact with. This means limiting the amount of interactions you can do with a given clause, as normal users will typically assume that, when inserting a clause, what they see is what they get. You may also want to prioritise assignment of attributes more than you would under the Q&A approach, as more users are working with the individual clauses.
For example: say you want to create two alternatives of a pricing clause: one needs to just show the price of the product, the other needs to state that the price is listed in an annex to the contract.
The text of the clause listing the price could be:
The text of the clause referring to the pricing annex could then be:
With the Q&A-focused approach, you would want to put the two sentences in the same clause, separated by a condition that triggers one sentence or the other. Without going into too much detail on the Clause9 grammar just yet, conceptually, that could look something like this:
If the answer to the question “where is the product price listed?” equals “contract”, show the following sentence: The Product shall be priced at [insert price here]. If the answer to the question “where is the product price listed?” equals “annex”, show the following sentence: The price for the Product shall be as established in the price list as attached to this Contract.
In the Assemble Document-focused approach, you would want to make two separate clauses and link them together as alternatives using the “links” functionality that each clause has. This allows users to quickly switch between available alternatives at the click of a button.
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