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attach multiple documents to custom list. what's the best way?

I have a custom list containing information on technical drawings (name, part, author, date, revision, etc..) I also have files associated to each drawing sitting on my network server that I want to upload to sharepoint and link to their respective drawing. These documents are drawing comments (in word format, scans of the drawings (in pdf format), source files (in autocad format), Basically, I'd like an engineer who looks up a drawing in sharepoint to be able to easily pull up any of these relevant associated files with a simple from within sharepoint.
1) I know I could attach these files to each drawings, but is there a way have a separate column in my list for each attachment?

2) Would it be cleaner to create a document library for all these files and somewhat link my list of drawings to the respective document?

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Raphilass

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odsail

I would like to add to Raphilass's comment. I like their approach as this will provide the version control on each of those documents. If you add these documents as attachments to your custom list and you have version control turned on, you will find that only the most recent version of the attachment is saved and all previous versions are not retained. The attachment field does not honor the enabled version control for the list. All other fields will however be honored. You can test this out by looking at version history. Change the attachments a few times. Then go back an look at the attachment for the first version. You will see only the latest version and no way of getting the original version back.

Another thing to consider if you haven't already is, the order in which these items are created or added. If documents can be uploaded to a library before the custom list item can exist that can make it a bit tricky to link them in an automated way. If the custom list item must exist before the documents can be uploaded then you might consider creating a custom column that let's you create the folder in the library and captures that link and stores it in the column. Good luck! Let us know what you decide to do.

Regards,

Scott

chiche

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thanks! I think I am going to put all the documents in a document library and create a field in my list that has multiple value and can lookup on this library ( I think asking users to enter a URL for the files is way too complicated)

however, how do I lookup the file NAME of a document and not the TITLE which can be anyhing and is not relevant for me.

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Raphilass

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odsail

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