Disabling history for process instances

Methods to clear process instance history

Over a period of time, a number of process instances can account for a significant amount of storage in the database. BMC Helix Innovation Studio uses one of the following methods to clear process instance history:

• Archive forms—Archive forms are exact replicas of source forms for which data archival is required. Leveraging archive forms works in most cases; however, in rapidly growing environments, data archival activity causes a large I/O wait time in the database. 
  This approach is deprecated for process instances.
• Database cleanup scripts—Database cleanup scripts delete the data from relevant tables regularly. The use of database cleanup scripts is more effective compared to archive forms, but if the amount of data is large, these cleanup scripts run more frequently and are prone to high I/O wait times.

Disabling history for process instances

Because the rate of data growth is the key in rapidly growing environments, BMC Helix Innovation Studio has introduced a new method that allows users to control which processes are required to be logged for historic purposes. If your application runs many processes, recording and storing the process history for all these processes inflates the database with large amounts of data.

As an administrator, you can choose to disable the process history for any specific process instance to overcome this issue. Controlling the historic logging of each process eliminates a lot of noise, reduces the disk usage, input/output operations on a disk, and network transmits/receive data rate, and allows the BMC Helix Innovation Studio server more idle time.

To disable the history process instances

1. Log in to BMC Helix Innovation Studio and navigate to the Workspace tab.
2. Select the Environment Configuration application. 
3. From the Records tab, select the ProcessConfiguration record definition, and click Edit Data.
4. On the Data Editor (ProcessConfiguration) page, click New.
5. On the New Record page, enter the following details:
   1. In the Application ID, enter the application bundle name.

   2. In Description, enter a description for the process instance.

      Success

      Best practice

      We recommend that you enter the process name in the Description field to help identify the process for which you will disable the history. 

   3. In ProcessDefinitionGuid, enter the GUID of the process instance.
      To access the GUID for a process, from the Processes tab, select the process, and from the Properties panel copy the GUID in the ID field.
      
   4. To disable the history of the process instance, select the HistoryEnabled  toggle key.
      
6. Click Save.