parent archive rule/child archive rule relationship

[Tylerjknapp]

Hi everyone, 

Hi, our team and I are looking to start archiving some of our old data, I've done the research on NOW Product Documentation and reviewed what they have for archiving there. The only thing that my colleagues and myself are having a hard time understanding is the parent archive rule and child archive rule relationship. So our understanding of this is as follows, the parent rule is a general very broad rule, the child rules become more granular and allow you to have multiple archive rules for one table. So if we want to archive data that has the following conditions, active=false, closed relative 3 years ago and then we have a specific line of business that wants data that is 2 years old or older archived, how would we do that with a parent/child archive rule. Would the parent rule archive 1 years worth of extra data? The conditions for the child rule would be the same as the parent the only difference is how long ago it was closed. Any advice on how to do this or how to better understand the parent/child archive rule would be greatly appreciated.

[Sebas Di Loreto · Accepted solution]

@Tylerjknapp 

Don't blame you for the confusion. Digesting the archiving information is not easy.

I don't think you are getting the parent/child concept right.

To DECIDE what to start archiving, the system will ONLY look at parent rules. Let's say we use the out of the box for REQUESTS (/sys_archive.do?sys_id=d95553219f0120007aaa207c7f4bcce7). It will evaluate that the request is inactive and closed more than 3 months ago (screen below). Then it will check if that specific request that was just archived has any related records like SLAs or metrics (I added those to the out of the box example) and it will archive those as well since you don't want to leave meaningless information on the system, mostly when the corresponding request has been archived already. The third archive related record is the most important in this explanation since it will check if the request has requested items and archive them as well. AND here is when the "child" archive rule can come into play (second screen). If you have an archive rule for the requested item table WITH the parent field pointing to the requests archive rule, then it will check WHAT ELSE must be archived for that requested item that was just archived (sc_tasks and approvals in this example), but remember that everything started with the request record being archived. If you noticed the out of the box condition on the requested item archive rule is irrelevant and non sense, you might as well leave it empty but you could condition even further if you want.

[Annay Das]

Hi @Sebas Di Loreto ,

Thanks a lot for the clarification. Your answer explains almost everything that is barely documented in the docs page.

However, I am still curious how is the parent/child rule different from Archive Related Records. In the screenshots, I can see the OOB rule has both parent/child relationship as well as an entry for Requested Item in the Archive Related Records related list.

[Jim Jackson]

I am attempting to setup an archive similar to a request and request item archive.    It is a finance request and the child is a purchase request.      When I create the parent archive finance request, I cannot then create a request item purchase request archive.    
Using request and request item as an example, what is the order of operation that allows you to configure the 2 archives and relate them as shown?   

[Tylerjknapp]

Thanks for the clarification @Sebas Di Loreto. Now if we leave the conditions for the parent archive rule empty won't it just archive everything? That was the problem with doing that I had assumed based on looking at the record estimate.

Any advice on how you would recommend what is being asked here, to have a general rule of archiving stuff 3 years old or older but for a specific business division they want it to be 2 years.