Setting Expiration Duration on Temporary Documents Folder in 18.1

Good afternoon, and happy Friday!

Please refer to the documentation at: https://docs.appian.com/suite/help/18.1/Appian_Release_Notes.html#documents-tab

This describes the behavior changes to knowledge centers in 18.1.

Thanks Robert!
So I find the detail provided on that release notes page to be a bit lacking, specifically with respect to expirations. Is the implication that knowledge centers with an expiration set previously will now have NO expiration as of 18.1? Or just that there is no way to control it now, so any expirations set for in-use knowlege centers are now stuck permanently?

I don't have the details, but I've raised awareness about this thread internally. Perhaps that will lead to clarification.
Generally speaking, it's reasonably to open a case with Appian support to report or inquire about unexpected product behavior.

Thanks Rob and Mike, I opened a support case earlier today I will update the thread with what I hear from them.

Hi all,

Knowledge centers with an expiration duration configured (any Knowledge Centers created in /design do not have one) continue to respect the configuration after upgrade to Appian 18.1+. The expiration duration of knowledge centers can still be updated via the Edit KC Properties smart service and the public API. As a reminder, documents (and their versions) that become expired aren't actually removed from the system and still need to be deleted (if the reason you are configuring it is to clean disk space).

I agree that the release note in 18.1 could use some clarity, I'll make sure the team updates it.

Hi all,

Knowledge centers with an expiration duration configured (any Knowledge Centers created in /design do not have one) continue to respect the configuration after upgrade to Appian 18.1+. The expiration duration of knowledge centers can still be updated via the Edit KC Properties smart service and the public API. As a reminder, documents (and their versions) that become expired aren't actually removed from the system and still need to be deleted (if the reason you are configuring it is to clean disk space).

I agree that the release note in 18.1 could use some clarity, I'll make sure the team updates it.

Kevin,
Thanks for the clarification, that should help. As a follow-up, though, what method would we use to check the current expiration value for any given knowledge center? I've had an issue in the past where the customer complained that documents seemed to be disappearing, and after some debugging I was able to find that the knowlege center had an expiration limit set (which it shouldn't have); however it seems that if a similar situation happened now, I'm not sure what I'd do, seeing as how there seems to be no functionality in New Designer to even see the expiration setting (if any).

As of 18.1, the only OOTB way to view that information is to use the knowledgecenter() function with the "expirationDays" property. 

Do you still find yourself looking for this information often nowadays?

Thanks for the tip regarding the knowledgecenter() function, it hadn't occurred to me that there might be something like that.

I luckily don't need to mess with that much these days as my primary projects never really used expiration limits on knowledge center - but the one time I did need to worry about it in the past, it was a complete surprise, so the thought that it would be super hard or impossible to check and/or update them via the UI now was making me a little uneasy.

I would imagine older / legacy systems which utilized expiration day limits more often might be more in need of being able to check them via the UI, though I suppose if there's an OOB function then someone could whip up a SAIL form to do so manually.

Thanks Kevin, the main reason we were looking into this is for disk space reasons so this is good information I will pass this information along to our sys admin. Looks like we will need a cleanup task to remove these docs.

Kevin-

The issue we are having is with the Temporary Documents knowledge center and it's only an issue on the servers that we have SELinux enabled on. On the other environments with the same application design, the documents get removed after 7 days, but in the higher environments, they are being left on the server. We suspect it's a security issue in the higher environments, but are having trouble determining exactly which process is causing the temporary documents are getting removed.

Any suggestions on what might be doing the clean up?

Sean---

Hi Sean,

The details around how your on-premise environments are configured are a bit outside of my wheelhouse, so I would suggest opening a support case with our Support team if you haven't already.

The Temporary Documents knowledge center has its own special file clean up (that is a separate thing from the expiration duration feature) that will actually delete the files stored in it. There are a couple of properties that can be overwritten in the custom.properties file to change the frequency of this feature; maybe it is possible those were updated by mistake?