parent archive rule/child archive rule relationship

Tylerjknapp · ‎01-09-2023

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 · ‎01-09-2023

@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as well since you don't want to leave meaningless information on the system, mostly when the corresponding request has been archived already.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.

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Sebas Di Loreto · ‎01-09-2023

@Tylerjknapp

The system won't allow you to active an archiving rule without conditions.

In your case I would create different parent archive rules for each business. Today is just a difference in years... tomorrow it will be more than that and trying to have a single one would be unmanageable.

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Tylerjknapp · ‎01-09-2023

@Sebas Di Loreto I thought you could only have one parent rule per a table?

Sebas Di Loreto · ‎01-09-2023

@Tylerjknapp

Yes, you are right about that. My bad.

Can you do something like this?

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Tylerjknapp · ‎01-09-2023

@Sebas Di Loreto that's the other alternate idea I could come up, I wanted to see if anybody else had any other ideas or knew any work arounds to having to have a bunch of conditions on the parent rule.

Tylerjknapp · ‎01-09-2023

@Sebas Di Loreto I just thought of an alternate idea, trying to do 3 years on the parent rule and 2 years on the child rule wouldn't work but what about the other way around. Doing 2 years on the parent rule and then having a child rule that specifies that assignment group there and another child rule that is a similar but excludes that specific assignment group and the closed date is relative to 3 years ago instead of 2. Do you think that would work?