Is it safe to delete published reports directly ?

[tevkar1]

Hi,

There are many report files at %programdata%\Nprinting\apps\*\*\reports\published

We want to delete reports older than 400 days. Is it safe to delete directly  as a common maintenance task ?

Combination of Days to Keep / Reports to Keep doesn't work for us as we have yearly reports published at newsstand and there can be many reports generated during development efforts.

We are using Qlik NPrinting May 2023 SR2 (Version: 23.20.5.0)

Kind regards

[Frank_S]

Hi @tevkar1 

No not exactly safe as there may be database references that will cause unexpected issues in your NP server if those files are deleted manually. 

(Further, those files might exist from older versions of NPrinting which did not clean up after itself as it does with current supported NPrinting versions).

To clean up the apps folder...check this article. 

https://community.qlik.com/t5/Official-Support-Articles/How-to-clean-up-Orphaned-NPrinting-database-...

Once clean up is complete, files to keep and days to keep should work as designed in current supported versions of NPrinting.

Kind regards

[tevkar1]

Hi,

 Orphaned reports doesn't apply in our case. We are unsure how days-to-to/number-to-keep function works. Is it system-wide or user-wide ? If it works as intended, then there will be no problem to remove published reports older than 400 days if you set days-to-keep to 400.

We have created a support case about the issue (#00168082) and we got the following response:

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Yes, they are good to delete old reports as they get generated as and when you run the Task to generate the reports.

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[Ruggero_Piccoli]

Hi,

Please do not delete those files directly; for each published report there are also records on the Repository DB that will remains if you will not follow a supported procedure.

Days to Keep and Reports to Keep are explained in details at https://help.qlik.com/en-US/nprinting/May2023/Content/NPrinting/DistributionSchedulesAutomation/Dist... . Please note that after changing those values you have to wait that the automatic cleaning task will run. To be sure you can check the tady after.

Each user can delete its NewsStand published reports by following the instructions documented in https://help.qlik.com/en-US/nprinting/May2023/Content/NPrinting/DistributionSchedulesAutomation/News.... This must be done by each single user, it can't be done by an administrator for a group of users. It is almost immediate. 

Best Regards,

Ruggero

[tevkar1]

Hi,

Thanks for the clarification @Ruggero_Piccoli  and @Frank_S 

Days to keep/Reports to keep can be configured per task, not as a general measure, hard in maintenance.

It is almost unbelievable that Nprinting doesn't have a maintenance friendly scheme to keep number of reports under control. You can't just leave that kind of control to users only - what if they don't clean up ?

Kind regards

[Ruggero_Piccoli]

Hi,

A person that can edit tasks can set Days to Keep and Reports to Keep at their minimum value that is 1. All reports exceeding will be deleted but a least one by report type and by user will remains. Remaining reports can be deleted manually by users. 

A user with rights to delete other users can delete profiles of people that, for example, are no more working in the company and all published report related to the deleted user will also be deleted. This means that you can delete a group of users, all related reports will be deleted and then recreate the same group of users for example by importing them (via Excel, APIs etc...).  

Best Regards,

Ruggero

[tevkar1]

Hi,

Thanks for suggestions @Ruggero_Piccoli 

We publish our reports via Newsstand and want to make the last two copies of yearly reports available. That means we need to set days to keep to at least to 365. In a such scenario, it will make sense to have centrally configured maintenance tasks cleaning up older report.

In my opinion, days-to-keep with a small value doesn't work well for reports published via Newsstand.

Kind regards.

[tevkar1]

Our requirement is a simple one: Set up a central (not task specific!) maintenance task so that all reports older than a specific age can be deleted. This is a policy which is quite easy to communicate to users.

Any chance to come up with a recipe ? It may involve Postgresql stuff as well.

[Ruggero_Piccoli]

Hi,

There is not a feature to delete reports older than a specified date.

What you can do is set Days to Keep and Reports to Keep parameters for each publish task and wait until the automatic cleaning task will ran. Minimum value is 1 for both, this means that at least 1 published report will be kept and only the user will be able to manually delete it from the NewsStand interface. 

If you delete a user profile ALL its published reports will be deleted. After you can re-create the user and that profile will have a clean NewsStand interface. 

Best Regards,

Ruggero

[tevkar1]

Thanks @Ruggero_Piccoli . Unfortunately, neither of the suggestions will help to solve our challenge. Not having a universal administration brake regarding published reports via Newstand is a major challenge if you have tens/hundreds of tasks, apps and users.