This topic presents information about the following selected properties
and property-related information.
- Date Content Last Accessed and Content Access Recording Level
- Folders Filed In
- Short or long custom string properties
- Hidden (Is Hidden) and Is Hidden Container
- Expression
- Using alias IDs to enable multiple object store searches
- Allows Foreign Object
- Settable system properties (Creator, DateCreated, DateLastModified,
LastModifier)
- Date Content Last Accessed and Content Access Recording Level
- The Content Access Recording Level property specifies the default
value for an object store for how often the Date Content Last Accessed
property is recorded. Content Access Recording Level is a settable
property of the object store. Date Content Last Accessed is a read-only
document property. Both properties are displayed in the administration
console on the object store's General tab.
- To update the Date Content Last Accessed property, select one
of the following options:
- Daily: set Content Access Recording Level to 86400 (the number
of seconds in a day)
- Hourly: set Content Access Recording Level to 3600 (the number
of seconds in an hour)
- Immediately: set Content Access Recording Level to 0.
- None: set Content Access Recording Level to -1.
- Date Content Last Accessed is updated when all three following
situations are fulfilled:
- Content Access Recording Level is not set to None.
- The time difference between the current and last access exceeds
Content Access Recording Level, or the Date Content Last Accessed
was not set previously.
- The content of the document or annotation is accessed by the client
application, including any of the following actions: create a document
with content, create an annotation, open the document content, or
annotation to view, copy the content to local.
This property is different from Date Last Modified, which records
any change to the properties of the object. If an operation to a document
or annotation does not affect the content of that document or annotation,
the Date Last Modified property is updated and the Date Content Last
Accessed is not updated. The Date Content Last Accessed is not updated
in the following situations:
- Any operation performed on a document without content.
- Any operation performed on a document with content where the operation
does not affect the content, for example, checking out a document
without getting the content.
- Canceling a check-out (since the cancellation does not modify
the content).
- Adding a simple annotation of descriptive text only without any
content elements.
- Any operation that updates the Date Last Modified property does
not necessarily update the Date Content Last Accessed. For example,
changing the document title updates the Date Last Modified property,
but does not update Date Content Last Accessed.
- Whenever content access date recording is turned on, you can experience
an impact on performance, which increases as you increase the recording
frequency.
- Folders Filed In
- The read-only Folders Filed In property returns the names of all
folders that a document is filed in. The value is empty if the document
is not filed in any folder. This property applies to all document-related
classes and is displayed in the administration console on the document's
Property tab.
- Short or long custom string properties
- You can define a custom string property to be stored in either
a "short" or "long" database column. "Short" corresponds to vargraphic
for IBM® DB2® (with a maximum length of
4000 characters), nvarchar for SQL Server (with
a maximum length of 4000 characters), or varchar2 for Oracle (with
a maximum length of 1333 characters). "Long" corresponds to dbclob
for DB2, ntext for SQL Server, or clob for Oracle (with
a maximum length of 1073741823 characters for both).
- Besides the maximum lengths permitted, the following differences
exist between short and long strings:
- A short string can be queried using any of the normal operators
(=, >, <, >=, and so on). A long string can be queried only
with LIKE andIBM
FileNet® Image Services(NOT)
NULL.
- If content-based retrieval (CBR) is enabled for the property,
both short and long strings can also be queried with the CONTAINS
and FREETEXT operators. (CBR queries do not typically perform as efficiently
as "database indexed" queries.)
- A long string column cannot be specified in a database index,
but a short string can be, therefore, queries on short strings return
quick query responses.
- A long string consumes a minimal number of bytes from the row
size limit, regardless of the actual length of the value. A short
string consumes a number of bytes equal to twice the character length
of the string value. Thus, for databases that have a maximum row size
limit, there is definite space advantage to using a long string column
for a property with limited query requirements, even if its maximum
length does not demand a long column.
- There is an unquantified performance disadvantage to using long
strings, because the actual text data is stored off-page (not with
the rest of the row data). Queries for long strings require an additional
read, all internal to the database processing, to retrieve the text
data. However, there is some overall gain to system performance from
reducing the overall row size for every document (or custom string
property) in the system by using the long string columns and thus
reducing the row size for each document fetched or stored.
- The following additional operation-type restrictions exist for
long columns (for full details see the DB2, Oracle, or SQL Server documentation):
- IBM DB2
- You cannot specify LOB columns in the ORDER BY clause of a query,
or in the GROUP BY clause of a query, or in an aggregate function.
- You cannot specify a LOB column in a SELECT ... DISTINCT or SELECT
... UNIQUE statement OR in a join.
- Oracle
- You cannot specify LOB columns in the ORDER BY clause of a query,
or in the GROUP BY clause of a query, or in an aggregate function.
- You cannot specify a LOB column in a SELECT ... DISTINCT or SELECT
... UNIQUE statement OR in a join.
- SQL Server
- NTEXT [,TEXT, and image] columns cannot be compared, sorted, or
used in a GROUP BY clause. The only exception is when usingIBM
FileNet Image Services NULL or LIKE. (An easy
workaround is to use CONVERT or user-defined functions that would
return other data types.)
- NTEXT [,TEXT, and image] columns cannot participate in a UNION
clause. This type of UNION is equivalent to a DISTINCT clause and
would cause an error because text, ntext, and image data types cannot
be sorted.
The type of column to use for a property is determined
by metaproperty UsesLongColumn, introduced (as set-only-on-create)
to PropertyTemplateString and (as read-only, copied from template)
to PropertyDefinitionString.
- Hidden (Is Hidden) and Is Hidden Container
- The Is Hidden system property indicates whether a class or property
should be hidden from non-administrative users. This attribute provides
a hint to the client application to not display the class property;
the property is not in fact a security permission. If the application
ignores the value of Is Hidden, the property is displayed the same
as any other property. This property is displayed in the administration
console on the Property tab of the class or property template.
- The Is Hidden Container custom property is added to the Folder
class (and all its subclasses) if you install the Base Content Engine Extensions add-on feature.
This property is used to hide a folder from the user in an application
that reads and respects the value that set for this property. This
property is displayed in the administration console on the folder's
Property tab and on the Property Definitions tab of folder classes.
- For more information about using this property, see Hiding a
folder.
- Expression
- This field enables you to define property-based conditions for
launching a workflow. This field accepts SQL expressions that use
workflow properties, operators, and values.
- For example, you can launch a workflow only if a document is created
by a specific user and contains specific words in the title. You want
to launch an approval workflow for documents in the selected class
added by Tammy Smith containing "Sales Analysis" in the title. Assume
that Tammy adds a document to the class that does not contain "Sales
Analysis" in the title. The subscription can launch the workflow,
based on the operator used:
- If you used "and" to join the two conditions, the workflow is
launched.
- If you used "or" to join these two conditions, the workflow is
not launched.
- The Expression field is evaluated to determine whether to launch
a workflow automatically. When the value is True, the workflow is
launched.
- For manual workflows, use the following guidelines:
Note: The Expression property, although
still valid, has been replaced by the more recent properties Filter
Expression and Filter Property in
the New Subscription wizard and on the Configuration tab
of the Event Subscription. If you have already assigned values to
this property, you can access and edit it by using the property grid
on the object's Properties tab or by using
search and bulk operations.
- Using alias IDs to enable multiple object store searches
- If you plan to support searches that span multiple object stores
for FileNet P8 clients,
create alias IDs for the properties users can search on before assigning
the property templates to a class. The alias IDs automatically propagate
to the class. For more information about creating and working with
alias IDs, see Create alias
IDs and Multiple
object store search.
- Allows Foreign Object
- This Boolean property indicates whether the property supports
references to objects in another object store (referred to as a "foreign"
object). When this property is set to true, an object belonging to
any object store to which the user has access can be set as the value
for defined property. The required class specified for the property
must be defined in the object store of the target object. This property
can be set only from the property template and is read-only on the
actual property definition.
- Settable system properties (Creator, DateCreated, DateLastModified,
LastModifier)
- Select users who run system-level tools, such as import and migration
tools, can set these four properties to Read/Write. For example, consider
a federated document where the document is updated after its metadata
on the original system was changed. Federation utilities must be able
to set some of these properties after the document is created.