Database Changes

Host Identifier

In previous versions, the document’s host identifier (ad number or story name on the host system) was stored as a custom field in the database. In order to standardize some of the previous custom processing and to lay the groundwork for future releases, the host identifier column is now the same for all sites: host_id.

Custom Stored Procedures

The custom stored procedures SQL scripts (custom_procs.sql) have been substantially modified to reduce the amount of custom code for each site and to improve the performance of the database in certain cases.

Three major changes were made to each site’s custom stored procedures:

·     Removal of various common stored procedures that are either no longer needed or can now be implemented in base_procs.sql, including FaxActionStartup.

·     The stored procedures that produce the lists in the Client have been dramatically changed. In order to lay the groundwork for next-generation enhancements and to improve the database performance, the raw list data is now generated using stored procedures and the definitions of the columns in each list are stored in new database tables. The details of this functionality are not documented in this release, as Admin does not yet have a maintenance mechanism for them.

·     The addition of a call to the standard stored procedure that sets the security on all FaxAction database items after the custom stored procedures have been created. This eliminates the need to have or run the script security.sql.

Standard Dataload Stored Procedures

New standard stored procedures designed to assist in account loads that do not have account deletion information embedded have been added. These stored procedures are discussed in the Admin documentation for Dataload.

Ad Type Foreign Key Constraints Removed

In previous versions, Dataload would fail to load new accounts if the account record contained an ad type and that ad type was not present in the list of FaxAction Ad Types. This was an unnecessary limitation and it has been removed by eliminating the Ad Type foreign key constraints on the accounts and class_documents tables.

Server Error Notification Change

FaxAction can automatically send an Email to a designated user or group of users whenever a document is received that encountered a server error or an OCR error. In previous versions, this functionality was implemented through a trigger on the database table that stored the information.

This created a severe problem, however, when the SQL Server mail interface (which is used to deliver the Email) was not configured correctly or not functioning correctly. In this case, the trigger would fail, which would cause the database record creation to be aborted, so no record would exist in the database for the problem records.

The code in the trigger has been removed and replaced by functionality identical code in the Input Server and OCR processes.

Timestamp Fields in Most Tables

A number of database tables have had timestamp fields added to record the user that last updated a specific record and when it was updated.

Incorrect User Name Stored in Tables

In some rare cases, the user name was not stored correctly in a database table’s timestamp record. This has been fixed.