Data retention
Data retention profiles allow you to delete data that you no longer need. You can use data retention profiles to:
- Remove data to comply with legal requirements.
- Keep your database small to improve performance.
- Keep your DTAP environments tidy (for example, by removing test data).
How does data retention work?
By default, all data added to your application is retained, even after it has been overwritten or the case has been closed. This ensures you have a complete audit trail of the values that have been recorded in an attribute and the tasks that have been performed.
On the other hand, this also means that the amount of data stored in the database only ever increases. As a result, your database can become quite large and this can impact your application's performance.
By configuring data retention profiles, you can ensure that historical data that is no longer needed is permanently deleted. Specifically, you can use data retention profiles to remove:
- Case data: The values stored in attributes on a case.
- Task data: Dates of completed tasks.
Configure data retention profiles
You can create and update data retention profiles from your Studio: select Platform > Data retention profiles.
You can then apply profiles to attributes, platform attributes and casetypes. If a profile is applied to casetype, it is also implicitly applied to all underlying attributes.
When you configure a data retention profile, the following options are available:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Cleanup overwritten (deleted) casedata | Removes previous values from an attribute's history. The current value remains. |
| Cleanup casedata of closed cases | Removes values from an attribute when a case is closed. If the case is reopened, the the data is not restored. |
| Cleanup casedata of open cases | Deletes values from an attribute on open cases. The data cannot be retrieved. |
| Cleanup task data | Deletes task data. Activities are shown in the audit trail, but the task data is no longer shown when opened in the audit trail. |
| Cleanup closed cases including underlying tasks and data | Deletes the case and all underlying tasks and attribute values when a case is closed. The case cannot be restored. |
| Only use cache, never store to database | Store data in the request session cache, rather than writing to the database. This is useful for attribute values that you only want to use temporarily. Note the following limitations: 1. The data cannot be used in a dataset. 2. The data does not survive multiple requests (no attribute values in the audit trail, mapping for tasks that become mandatory, async ESS etc). 3. Existing data is not immediately adjusted (but will be synchronized over time). 4. Unpredictable behavior of the reference/relatedcases/cached-calculatedfield/compilecache. |
| Data retention data age in days | The number of days for which data is retained before the data retention profile takes effect. |
| Dataset | Select a dataset to filter the cases to which the data retention profile is applied.Data is only deleted if the data retention profile has been applied to the attribute or casetype and the case is included in the dataset. If the dataset includes cases to which the data retention profile has not been applied, that data is not deleted. |
| Page casetype to calculate the dataset on | A dataset must always be calculated on one case. We calculate the dataset on a page. |