Considerations When Publishing Task Types with Indexed Data
The presence of indexed business data in a task type has a distinct impact on the My webMethods Server runtime 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 My webMethods Server 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 modifications have been made to the task type interface, assignments, events, and so on, but no changes have been made to the indexed data fields, there is no impact in the run-time environment.
If any changes have been made 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.
If you publish a task type with modified indexed business data structure while a reindexing procedure is running for that task type, the reindexing procedure will be stopped and the status message will be set to “Failed.” The
Task Engine drops the existing index table (and all its data), and creates a new (empty) table.
To populate a newly created table with data from existing task instances in your system, you must run the task reindexing procedure as described in
Reindexing Task Types That Contain
Indexed Business Data. 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, publishing updates to task types with modified indexed business data is best done during scheduled maintenance periods.
For more information about creating and working with tasks with indexed business data, see
webMethods BPM Task Development Help.
