Disabling history of process instances

BMC Helix Platform provides Manage Processes dashboard to view history of the process instances. The process instance history stores metadata such as start and end time, instance specific data like process variables, and results in various database tables. It is important that the process instances are deleted periodically to ensure optimal performance. As an administrator, you can choose to disable the process history for any specific process instance.

Methods to clean process instance history

Over a period of time, number of process instances account to significant amount of storage in the database. BMC Helix Platform uses one of the following methods to clean process instance history:

• Archive forms—Archive forms are exact replica 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 large I/O wait time in database. 
  This approach is deprecated for process instances.
• Database cleanup scripts—Database cleanup scripts delete the data from relevant tables on a regular basis. Use of database cleanup scripts is effective compared to archive forms but if the amount of data is large such cleanup scripts run more frequently and is prone to high I/O wait times.

To disable history of process instances

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

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

To disable the history of process instances, you can perform the following steps:

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 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 Description, enter a description for the process instance.

      Best practice

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

   2. 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.
      
   3. To disable the history of the process instance, select the HistoryEnabled toggle key .
      
      
6. Click Save. 

Related topics

Defining processes to accomplish business goals

Managing processes by using the Manage Processes dashboard