Administering the Process Portal index

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The Process Portal index allows process participants who are working in Process Portal in non-federated environments to search business processes for instance data. The index is also used to provide data for the charts in the Process Performance and Team Performance dashboards.

Indexing on an Business Automation Workflow system is enabled by default. Process instances and tasks are indexed according to a time interval that you can specify. To change the indexing behavior, you must edit the 100Custom.xml configuration file. If a problem occurs with the index, commands are available for updating and rebuilding it.

Tasks and process instances are indexed in the following situations:
Tasks
  • A task is assigned.
  • A task is completed and the business data is updated.
  • The due date or at-risk date of a task is changed.
  • The priority of a task is changed.
Process instances
  • An instance is started, completed, suspended, resumed, terminated, or restarted.
  • An instance failed.
  • The due date or at-risk date of an instance is changed.

For example, business data for a process instance that exists when a task and its corresponding process instance activity are completed gets indexed with both the task and instance. Process participants can find the task or instance by searching the instance business data. If a task form consists of several coach views but only one coach view is complete, the updates from this coach view are not searchable until all the coach views in the task form are complete.

By default, the previous tasks in a process instance are not re-indexed when later tasks are completed and the business data for the process instance is updated. If you want the updated business data to be searchable from previously completed tasks, change the value of the <task-index-update-completed-tasks> configuration setting to true in the 100Custom.xml file. If the process instance has a lot of previous tasks, re-indexing these tasks might degrade the system performance.

To make particular business data searchable in Process Portal, use Process Designer to make the appropriate process instance variable visible in Process Portal and to set the alias name that is used to search for the business data.

To benefit from a better performance and a richer set of search capabilities, it is highly recommended to enable the Federated Data Repository process indexing by setting <fdr-index-enabled> to true and disable the Process Portal search index by setting <task-index-enabled> to false.
However, keep the following points in mind:
  • If you are still using Process Portal, disabling the Process Portal search index will remove the full text search input field and the Process Portal dashboards. Instead of using Process Portal, consider using Workplace along with the enabled Federated Data Repository process indexing, and then disable the Process Portal search index without degrading the user experience.
  • If you are still using the /rest/bpm/wle/v1/tasks REST API, disabling the Process Portal search index will remove the full text search support with this API. Instead of using the /rest/bpm/wle/v1/tasks REST API, switch to the advanced search API that is exposed on /rest/bpm/wle/v2, which offers a richer set of search capabilities, and then disable the Process Portal search index and enable the Federated Data Repository process indexing to improve the overall performance and benefit from a richer search REST API.