TrackDeletedItems

Introduction

If a user deletes a document from the Livelink Repository, the Google Search Appliance (GSA) will retain the deleted items' information in its search index until it has been notified of the deletion. In practice, this does not impact the user. Search hits on deleted items are filtered out of the result set when the Livelink Connector authorizes search hits for user access. However, maintaining index and meta-data information for large numbers of deleted items would slow down searches, waste CPU and storage resources, and consume document licenses.

Livelink Connector versions 1.0.4 and later support notifying the Google Search Appliance when items have been deleted from the Livelink repository. However, enabling the Livelink Connector to detect item deletions requires that a Livelink Administrator turn on a specific auditing feature in the Livelink Server.

In addition, connector deployments with several Livelink Connector instances indexing the same Livelink repository requires thoughtful handling of deleted items.

Enable Auditing of Delete Events in Livelink

Allowing the Livelink Connector to detect item deletions requires that a Livelink Administrator turn on a specific auditing feature in the Livelink Server.

To enable Livelink auditing of deleted items:

1. Navigate to the "Livelink Administration" page on the Livelink server.
2. Under the "System Administration" section, select "Administer Event Auditing".
3. Select "Set Auditing Interests".
4. If "Delete" events are not already enabled, do so.

If auditing is already enabled for many different events (especially verbose ones like login,logout, and view) you may want to add a database index for the AuditID field of the DAuditNew table of the Livelink backend database. The instructions for doing so are different for each database vendor and should only be done by a qualified Livelink database administrator.

Latencies When Tracking Delete Events

When Livelink Containers (Folders, Projects, etc) are deleted, the documents they contain are moved to the Undelete Workspace (where they may be retrieved by a Livelink System Administrator), then the Container object is deleted immediately. Items in the Undelete Workspace are purged periodically (by default after 1 week) or by a trigger from the Livelink administrator.

From the perspective of the GSA, it will see requests to remove Container items from the index soon after they are deleted, but may not see requests to remove documents for several days after they were first "deleted" by the user.

Tracking Deleted Items over Multiple Connector Instances

The Livelink Audit Log does not preserve the original location from where items were deleted. If the Livelink Connector was configured to only index items from a small set of folders, the Connector cannot determine if deleted items originated from that set of folders. Therefore, all deleted items are fed to the GSA, whether the documents have been indexed or not. The GSA efficiently handles delete requests for items it never indexed.

TODO: talk about setting up a connector dedicated to deletes.