Answers From Documents
2 min read
Some questions are not about records at all. How does this feature work? and what does our spec say about expired cards? are answered from documents, and Oracle reads from two of them.
The Two Corpora
Section titled “The Two Corpora”| Source | What it holds | Who can reach it |
|---|---|---|
| Your Canon documents | The specifications you uploaded to this project or workspace | Anyone who can read Canon in that scope |
| Hawzu documentation | These pages — how the product itself works | Everyone |
Oracle picks between them from the question, and can use both when a question genuinely spans the two — “how do I set this up, and what does our spec require?”
Reading the Answer
Section titled “Reading the Answer”The answer names its corpus before the first word arrives, above the text: From your Canon documents, From Hawzu documentation, or From your documents and Hawzu’s.
Underneath, the sources it used:
- A Hawzu source shows the page title and links straight to it.
- A Canon source shows your document’s title and the passage locators it read — a page or section — but no link, because the document is yours and lives in your project.
Choosing the Source Yourself
Section titled “Choosing the Source Yourself”Inside a project, the assistant offers a source control: Auto, Records, Canon and Docs — named for the destination each one forces.
Auto lets Oracle route. Choosing one of the others forces it, and skips the routing step entirely — so a forced source is slightly faster as well as more certain.
Getting a Better Document Answer
Section titled “Getting a Better Document Answer”Document answers are only as good as the passages Oracle can find, so the question does more work here than it does for records:
- Name the thing. “What does our checkout spec say about promo code expiry?” finds a passage; “tell me about checkout” finds many and settles on none.
- Ask one thing at a time. Two questions in one sentence usually get one answered well and one glossed.
- Use your own document’s language. Canon is searched by meaning, but a term your specification actually uses is a stronger anchor than a synonym.
If an answer is thin, the useful next step is usually to check whether the topic is in Canon at all rather than to rephrase. See Canon Best Practices.
When Nothing Covers It
Section titled “When Nothing Covers It”Oracle says so, and names which source it looked in:
I couldn’t find that in the Hawzu documentation or in your project documents.
It does not fill the gap from general knowledge. If your Canon does not describe a behaviour, the honest answer is that your Canon does not describe it — that gap is usually the thing worth knowing.