EXTENDING APPLICATION BEHAVIOR THROUGH ACTIVE PROPERTIES ATTACHED TO A DOCUMENT IN A DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

A document management system is provided which organizes, stores and retrieves documents according to properties attached to the documents. A property attachment mechanism allows an application to attach arbitrary static and active properties to a document. The active properties include executable code which perform document management functions to control the state and behavior of the document in response to a triggering event. In this manner, the state and behavior of the document is provided to a user and is accurately maintained even when the application is not running.