Deleting documents

When you delete a mapped document or range of mapped documents from the Image Services system, the document properties and annotations are deleted automatically from both Image Services and Content Engine.

In the same way, when you delete a mapped document or range of mapped documents from Content Engine, the document properties and annotations are deleted automatically from Image Services and Content Engine.

NOTE  After documents have been federated, it is not possible to unfederate them. You cannot delete Content Engine catalog data without causing the corresponding Image Services catalog data and content to be deleted. In the same way, you cannot initiate a deletion from the Image Services server without causing the corresponding Content Engine catalog data to be deleted.

If a Records Management application on the Content Engine system has locked any Content Federation Services for Image Services documents (declared them as records) on the Image Services system, those documents cannot be deleted using the Image Services Database Maintenance tools, regardless of their assigned date. Only the Records Management application on Content Engine can delete locked documents from Image Services.

Secure Deletes

Image Services does not currently support secure deletion of document content.

A single Image Services disk cache might have multiple copies of a document because of its transient nature. For example, when a document is moved out of cache, the cache space is returned to a free space pool, but the space is not scrubbed. When the same document is retrieved, it could use the same free space. As a result, there could be several copies of the document in a cache. The copies in free space are not managed by Image Services as document objects but are still on magnetic disk.

The primary cache object is not removed immediately when removed if Image Services delete capability is used (DOC_delete_documents). It is assumed that cache object will be aged out if it is in cache. The cache object is removed immediately if the system is a cache-only system.

When the Class of a Document or Annotation Has Changed

When a federated document's class has been changed to a native Content Engine document class, the deletion of this document on Content Engine is propagated to Image Services.

However, when an Image Services annotation's class has been changed to a native Content Engine annotation class, the deletion of this annotation on Content Engine is not propagated to Image Services. The following examples illustrate this behavior:

Changing the Class for a federated document on Content Engine

Result: The document is deleted on Content Engine and deletion propagates to Image Services.

Changing the Class for an Image Services annotation on Content Engine

Result: The annotation is deleted on Content Engine but the deletion does not propagate to Image Services.

Do not change the Content Engine class of Image Services annotations.