Considerations When Publishing Tasks with Indexed Data

The presence of indexed business data in a task type has a distinct impact on the run-time environment when you publish a task type that is enabled for indexed searches. You must be aware of these considerations before you begin publishing indexed search tasks to the runtime to avoid negative affects.

Indexed business data fields are stored in a database table in the run-time environment. These table entries are searched when an business data search is executed by the user. There is one database table for each task type that you publish to the runtime.

When a task type with indexed business data is published for the first time, the Task Engine creates the database table with one column for each indexed field in the task type. You must be aware of the following important issues when you publish the task type thereafter:

If you have modified the task type interface, assignments, events, and so on, but have made no changes to the indexed data fields, there is no impact in the run-time environment.

If you have made any change to the indexed business data (for example, add or remove a field, or change a field type or attribute), the Task Engine detects this automatically, drops the existing index table for the task type (and all its data), and creates a new (empty) table.

To populate the newly created table with data from any existing task instances in your system, you must run the task reindexing procedure as described in the PDF publication webMethods Task Engine User’s Guide. This means that for the time period between publishing the modified task type and completion of the reindexing procedure, any searches run from a task instance of this task type will return incomplete results or no results at all.

You are advised to consider the impact of publishing task types with indexed business data very carefully. For production environments, you must publish updates to task types with modified indexed business data and reindex business data only during scheduled maintenance periods.

For more information about task business data reindexing, see webMethods Task Engine User’s Guide.

For more information about indexed business data, see About Indexed Business Data Fields.