PURPOSE: To provide an improved method and device which operate documents existing in many document relations in a data processing system.

CONSTITUTION: A user preference object is generated and used to store plural specific user preferences for selected or all documents including selection attributes. Thereafter, operations to be tried such as transfer, copy, and erase of documents in many document relations are limited in accordance with preferences stored in the user preference object. Thus, a distribution service can present and distribute selected documents which cannot be normally distributed because of incompatible characteristics of other documents existing in relation to a selected document.