Metadata for the brave

Metadata  in Livelink (Yawn ContentServer) is mostly by a Object Called Categories.A Category Object again is of subtype 131 and it can have versions.Its content or version file looks like XML and translates the data structure for use with Livelink.When some one adds a Category to an Object like Document,Folder etc  what you are essentially doing is requesting the latest copy of the Category Template(131) or it will be the Category applied to the parent container.Then it goes through an oscript/weblingo layer where it paints the structure like is it a Text? is it Mandatory and so on.Increasingly I see OT advising customers to use SETS and that too with Multiple Values.I tried to stay away from SETS in my design because it is next to impossible to write reports when there is more than one value involved 🙂

A Picture is worth a thousand words so I am showing a Category called SapCategory as you can see I have some that are very self descriptive however these terminology is probably worth understanding.In Livelink projects you will affix useful metadata{ a set of categories(131), some Classifications(199) or RM Classifications (551) }.OT has prided itself on capability of its search and indexing engine(after all OT was the first guys to index the OED and that greatly increases the work they put in this ) so all this metadata that you put and inherit it down to millions of items is supposed to find you patterns of knowledge in your organization.The xECM side of the house puts technical categories so does AGA so that in first shot looking at the object metadata one can even say what it purports to be.Classifications and RM Classifications look like category metadata but they allow alternate taxonomies and navigation structures.

MVA-Multi Valued Attribute indicate by the + and – signs.In any case if you only have one Value also it is internally a List of values.On top of it now all Livelink servers can have that in more than one language . OT does not the make category metadata multi language but our good friends at Cassia ECM make it and sell it through OT.

Set -The Set is a place holder where in you can define more and more primitive datatypes and it looks aesthetically pleasing(?) or even easier to understand data.Both Sets and Categories subtype will say AttrType=-18 and AttrID indicates the position.

For techies see my revelation to the world I think the link is permanently lost

There is a simple Request Handler called attributes.dump ( perhaps it is hidden in the admin.index pages and you might need a SA prv) you will see that the Set Identifier does not have a Attribute ID

Nobody from OpenText has told the programming world or developers how to look at this DataStructure well not in so many words at least.. Everyone is using their own methods do something.How many SET parsing/example  requests happen in the OT KB and OT answers cryptically? Or as a Java or a C# programmer is one supposed to be that intelligent to figure everything out? I believe it is very shortsighted of OT to push towards their professional services,or WebReports to achieve anything and everything.Since the move from LAPI some hobby programmers have shown the parsing.I have had countless requests from developers who wanted to see how to go about it so this is a way to help them. Actually since all ReturnValues are coded for OOP apparently this is much easier than in LAPI days but still a new programmer cannot be expected to become a livelink knowledgeable person for participating in one project.

Imagine a Node Object like Document or Folder has had a category attached,then its values are in its MetaData Object.The MetaData Object consists of AttributeGroups which are akin to List of Categories.So if you have applied 7 Categorise expect 7.These 7 will show you empty shells or filled shells of information.

So I have this and another category attached /applied to an object

As you can see those are the two categories or an AttributeGroups Object of two AttributeGroup.OK so if you isolate one AttributeGroup you will get the individual keys(Attributes).OK then you need to test/cast these complex structures from their Livelink given out DataValue to things people can understand Namely StrinValue,IntegerValue and DateValue.Now if a Set is encountered you will get a TableValue object.Now the TableValue will contain a excel row like representation and is a RowValue Object.Once you isolate the RowValue into its DataValue you will get its IntegerValue,StringValue and such like.Good thing they did not allow a Set inside a Set 🙂

The key of an Attribute is made up of <category dataid>_<version>_<attributeID>

So hopefully the code I post in C# helps a poor soul.Now please understand that the Category Data Structure is a pretty complicated way how the Data is shown,how the Data is held in a Table and how the reporting table has been considered. When we were in the LAPI era the entire structure was given to you as a LLValue Object out of which you had to get the Types isolated and program.This was me in 2004 battling out a worked out example in LAPI documentation   which actually did not work if you actually cut and pasted the sample.So I just took it as a challenge and trying to learn the OT debugger and its Script actually helped me with it

 

Link to Code File coming soon 🙂 One thing I noticed in 2017 against CS16 is now OT has already built a category called “External Att” with some commonly asked of functionality Good Job…

Hopefully they might be trying to get rid of the “Additional Node Attributes” piece in OT

Screen Cap of when I run the code against a Node in LL.You can optimize the loops when you understand how the code is supposed to be written.Frankly my intention is to show  you how  to iterate the DataStructure.

 

A C# file that I wrote that takes a NodeID in Livelink and spits out Category Info

Including Sets & MVA

 

 

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To Undelete or Not

Many times Administrators and users do things stupidly and want to cover their tracks quickly and without creating unwanted attention.Most people working with livelink know that the application is responsible for the data integrity and referential integrity.So to do any proper reversal you would need to script something back.But again here you are at a disadvantage.If you resort to standard OT support the maximum you are going to get is “you have an error that is not easily fixable and we would recommend you to fix it with our professional services team”.To a org or a small company they do not have that many resources or money to do that,hence the administrator or  a power user turned developer would try to see if something can be done.Lo and behold the KB is consulted and most members who would like to show off will post in their comments.Now that goes for me also because there isn’t a day that goes by when I cannot respond to something.However I am very judicious when I tamper with the livelink database.That is really because I understand oscript and I see the many myriad transactions that happen when it is working,doing upgrades and such.But in many organizations people are well versed in Live Reports and many now have the Web Reports product which is an excellent alternative to certain kinds of programming or utility programs .This is where the start of the problems happen.Say you accepted a bad advice like fixing a column or data point in a table that the “learned KB people” advised,you would not probably notice this way into months or years at part of a upgrade so what you did in earnest will land you in irrecoverable or costly difficulties.So RESIST the urge to change values in OT given tables.If it is your table and you are responsible for it do so by all means.There is no problem with you playing in a VM and understanding it but just don’t think that touching llattrblobdata or llattrdata is all it requires to do category updates 🙂

That doesn’t absolve OT as a company,it is expected to do its fair share.Somethings might be

1. Perhaps with support paid the customer gets 10 free incident fixes. OT absorbs the development  cost and passes the solution to a would be  admin/dev in the organization.
2. A list of compiled easy to use reports and utilities,perhaps web reports, perhaps a compiled java app that uses REST or WSAPI or even a utility oscript module.
3. Some re-assurance from support to quell the panic and perhaps advise the customer to do another thing like tell them a deleted user/users necessarily need not be considered a panic situation.

 

I had a short stint working with Documentum and I did not know if the utilities it delivered were high priced like what OT does but it had a language called DQL (Documentum Query Language).So any guys who is knowledgeable on the schema could run reports and turn them into DQL commands which would basically honor data integrity and referential integrity for them.This is in a way WR does but it takes enormous patience and complexity to work with it which again would mean should I have developers supporting my application.I would advise WR people in OT to provide clear crisp examples 1 to 5 liners that should work with any livelink any schema,kind of a pre built library more like the canned Live Reports

 

I tested a user deletion today and tried to see what all tables would be affected so for KB users if you want to see it is here.hopefully I will find a cheap hosting provider to put my content and not in KB as I have been burned in my earlier attempts.

“Why it may not be a good idea to update livelink tables.docx” can be accessed via the following link: https://knowledge.opentext.com/knowledge/cs.dll/Properties/61862916

 

 

 

General Help Series 3-Privileges (Am I allowed something)

Privileges

Privileges apply to you as the “user” versus permissions are what the Object allows a “user” to do.There are differences.For e.g for installing something in windows you need to be part of the “administrators” group similarly to install something you need to be in the “system administrators” group. A “administrator group user” has almost very high privileges to do things in a OS similarly they have a high degree of authority in livelink as well.So when a user is created we set at the minimum these privileges Login Enabled and Public Access So when a objects is accessed at run time livelink’s algorithm is does user have login,does user have PA and does Object have PA and what like S,or SC so it is a given that the user will be able to click the link. In very simple terms use PA effectively to address contents that is useful for the whole environment almost like using livelink as a glorified web server.

Now other things are self explanatory has User Creation,System administration and others leading to making Group Leaders etc.In short if you spend some time understanding the architecture you will be amazed and the simple but very effective thought being given into its devlopment.

The Add New Item Truth Table

The livelink system is replete with several subtypes some  of the are very useful and harmless like folders,documents etc so nobody changes anything from default. However you would be very concerned if somebody go unauthorized access to Live Reports,workflows,form templates etc,so what I do is I will look at the personal workspace of a default user and see all the “New Items” being shown there.Then I evaluate what should a untrained user be allowed to create in my system.For all the complicated ones I will create a manual group called “r-Form Template Creators” and add ‘Admin’ to that.Now if I have trust to give a group or a user I would expand my group.So when these new person goes and he has permissions to “Add Items,Reserve , Delete” this user will see “Form Template” there. However h(s)e moves to another folder where he has only “S,SC” he does not see it there.Note different object subtypes do different things.I am not keen to explain everything like Tasks,Discussions,Projects ec they are for you to explore and set right.Before releasing a system to production give a simple user access and do some Gorilla Testing  that will help you more than the amount of money spent on stress testing.Obviously you should have at laest oe or two good front ends and a good beefy admin server to do your search stuff.

General Help Series 2-Permissions (Would the Object allow me to do this)

Permissions 

At the outset a Livelink system represents some vestiges of a File System like Unix or Dos.People having worked in that is probably familiar with the term U G O which stood for User,Group,Others.This is what you see in the std permission bit of an object on its ACL. Every object has one ,many times you set the container object right and let the inheritance trickle in.In many places if you set it right you can forget it.But if you install livelink Out of the Box and has no training or nobody to watch it over you are probably going to end up in rogue territory.This is because the user ‘Admin’ and ‘Default Group’ has very high permission bits set.Out of which the owner is a role,so if you start a folder where Admin did not willfully do the permissions set normalization and if you gave ‘Appu’ creation privileges  for folder when ‘Appu’ creates objects he becomes owner who is very powerful and so on.Now this could be argued as not a big problem until it runs amok.So what a good permission model is Owner See,See Contents or Nothing,Group See,SC or Nothing and PA,S,SC or nothing.Now you will create administrative groups something simlilar to these discussions and you will be fine.

Always rely on proper groups that you can create and maintain in a directory service (AD is very common) and have those groups synchronized in.It is quite possible that HR systems release feeds into Directory services hence when users leave your organization they will go as well.There will be no permission problems because the real administrative group has overriding permissions that the owner based approach.Simple try it and  you will be happy and 50 % of your help desk tickets will come down.

This is what one hears in OpenText engagements as “Community Modelling” well my next part will cover object truth tables as well.

Permissions bit use BitWise logic in FileSystems as well as livelink does recently a programmer told me he finds the awesome bitwise logic un understandable.I just thought wow where is the programming world heading into 🙂

There is nothing wrong in owner having high permissions so long as the administration is willing to support it and understand it.

Security Clearance and Supplemental Markings are OT’s way of securing against inheritance rules in big hush hush organizations.