Want to learn how to schedule a document purge process in OnBase? Let us show you how in this blog and the video below!

How to Schedule a Document Purge Process

How to Schedule a Document Purge Process

1. First off, you need to make sure that the thick client has the dash sched command line switch added to its properties so that it can run the process. Know that you’re going to want to put this on whatever workstation you’re deciding that is going to be running these processes.

To do that, right-click on the icon for the thick client on the desktop. Go to properties and you’ll see it’s already added, but if it by any chance is not, you can add the dash dash.

And once in properties, you will likely see that it’s already added here, but, if it isn’t there, you can add the dash dash sched switch. And then you can just go ahead and hit “apply” or “okay”, and that is all set.

2. Next, open up the thick client, and within the thick client, navigate through “admin”, “utilities”, and “document maintenance.” And what will show here are any documents that were deleted in OnBase. It doesn’t matter what client, they show up here.

In our video example, there were only seven documents, but when looking in your own system, you might notice significantly more, maybe even thousands or hundreds of thousands. So that’s something to keep in mind as we’re scheduling, and we’ll cover that more later in this blog.

3. So here, you will right-click in the window and you’ll see a few options. You can retrieve any of the documents back if you deleted them on accident. You can just purge whatever documents you select. You can just purge all, which is not a bad plan if you have just seven documents like we had in our example video. But if you want to do this on a regular schedule or you have a large volume of documents, you won’t want to just hit purge all because, if we have lots of documents, OnBase is going to try to get through all of those, and it might lock up. But what you want here is to schedule a purge. So if you select that option, you get this schedule management window. If you’ve ever configured a schedule for a scan queue or sweep process, you might be familiar with this. It’s almost exactly the same. You will then see your purge options, which we’ll get into later in this blog.

4. Next, you’ll get the chance to add a name. One option is to name it after the document type you’re looking to purge, or if it’s a specific internal process, you can name it after that. You have the option to choose a workstation. Remember when we mentioned making sure the schedule switch is on the correct workstation which you want to run this process from? Well this is where you could select that. So if you want to spread out any processing work or if you already have a lot of processing work going on, you can divide it up that way.

Then, we have our schedule template. The ones that come out of the box are weekends, weekdays, and end of month. You also have the option for a custom schedule. And you’ll see the default daily schedule, the time range, and the only thing you could change here is frequency. For custom schedule, you’ll be able to select the different days of the week if you wanna do it on a weekly basis. It just depends on your needs as an organization for this purge process. So if you, for example, double-click Monday, it’ll get rid of Monday so it won’t run on Mondays. If we double-click it again, though, it’ll run on Mondays again. So it’s just that easy to pick what days you want it to look at. And now you’ll see here this is no longer grayed out, so we can select the time range, so it’ll run any time within this time period.

You can also select a specific time. So if you want this to run at 6 AM every day every weekday, you can select that in the box below the “Specific Time” drop down.

Next, select a day. So if you wanted to save other processes going on during certain days of the week, you could set this process to run at a different time. Obviously, you could also select to not run it on that day. But if you still needed it done that day, this will override whatever the default daily schedule is.

So for our example, we did a time range, six to five, and for it to run every two minutes. Now that’s a lot, and we don’t necessarily recommend running it that quickly necessarily, it’s just a decision you’ll need to make based on how many documents you’re trying to purge at once. Typically though, you’ll choose something like once a week or once a month. It just depends what your needs are.

5. Next, we have purge options. There are a few really important settings here. As mentioned before, if you have a lot of documents and document maintenance, you’re not going to want to purge all of those at once. It will lock up your system, and it is not recommended. We’re talking, thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of documents. You definitely don’t wanna purge all those at once. So, this is where this comes into play where you can set the limit of documents per batch so it’ll only run through the first thousand it encounters.

You can limit the processing time so that if the process is taking longer than expected, it won’t run into other processes and cause a cascade effect with our resources on your computer. In this example, we limited the processing time so after twenty minutes passes, it won’t run anymore.

The third option you’ll see is more for if you are deleting documents in OnBase that might have been by accident. If that is the case, you will still have a little bit of time to retrieve those documents before the 90 days is up. Obviously, you could set this to different time periods based on your needs, too.

You can also restrict to document type group. If you have a lot of documents and a lot of different document types that need to be purged on a consistent schedule, we would recommend adding more than one purge process in that case. Or if you just have one specific document type that you need to purge these documents where they cannot exist in your system after a certain period of time, you can select it so that OnBase only deletes these specific documents as far as document type group goes. In our example, we didn’t need to restrict ours, so we left that unchecked.

And once everything looks good, you will want to make sure to double-check everything here, and you can go ahead and hit apply.

6. So if you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, I set up the schedule. How do I know that it’s running?”

The simplest way to know whether it’s running or not is going to be looking in system documents and the document type called system document purge report.

If you select that, you’ll see your purge report from today when the schedule ran, and you can see that it was successful. You can see the total processing time, the amount of documents, and all their information. The total processing time could be helpful if you’re creating a new schedule for the first time because it’ll help you gauge, “Okay. Seven documents took one second. I have seven hundred documents. How long is that going to take?” And then you can adjust your scheduled process accordingly to either increase the number of documents or process within a certain time frame this needs to run. All of that is up to you. And that’s all!

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