Applying a Field Constraint on a Field that contains historical data that violates that constraint

asked on August 31, 2016

The company I work for has used Laserfiche for almost 10 years. One of the fields should only contain capital letters and numbers, so I am looking at applying a regex constraint: [A-Z0-9_]+

Given that this field is a text field with no other constraints, historically, placed on it there are a large number of documents who contain data in this field that does not conform to this constraint.

So at the moment when I try to apply this to the field, I'm receiving an error indicating that I have 300k entries that do not satisfy the constraint. [Error code is 9900]

What would the be the most efficient way of dealing with this? Or is there a way I can set up the constraint only to apply to values from this point onwards?

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replied on August 31, 2016

One way of dealing with it is to create a new template that is for the historical data. Then run a workflow to retrieve the current field values, assign the new template, and assign the field values. One problem with that would be it would not make those documents searchable with the same fields.

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replied on August 31, 2016

I had considered that. I'm hoping to avoid that since we have several million documents in our repository, and if I went that route, I'd have to move the values over for all records, and update our QF / WF sessions.

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replied on August 31, 2016

You could go the other route and create a new template for all newer documents that will need that requirement.

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replied on August 31, 2016

Unfortunately a separate template is not an option based on business requirements. The original set up had separate templates per business line, but this was consolidated about 2 years ago, as this separation was creating issues.

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Applying a Field Constraint on a Field that contains historical data that violates that constraint

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