At the end of a test phase, the inboxes of several users are often full of work items, which are no longer required. In the productive phase, finished work items should be deleted or archived after a specific length of time in the system.
Since the work items in the user inboxes are not private copies unlike mail, but are only references to a single work item, it is not possible to delete the inbox of only one user. Work items can only ever be deleted as such, that is, from the inboxes of all users.
Reports RSWWWIDE and RSWWHIDE are available for this. Both reports are purely administration tools. They delete all selected work items directly without further warning messages or authorization checks in the database. RSWWWIDE deletes the work item as such (including its attachments and all dependent work items), RSWWHIDE deletes the work item history. RSWWWIDE can also delete work items which are not in a final status or that are part of a higher-level workflow. After executing the reports, there is not a possibility to reconstruct the deleted work items.
For safety reasons we recommend first starting both reports online, making the required selection and setting the flag "Only display list". After making sure that the required selection is correct, the actual deletion should occur in a background, for performance reasons, whose only step is the report RSWWWIDE (or as a second step RSWWHIDE) in the variant determined beforehand.
You have the option of archiving work items. For this, both an archiving object WORKITEM and an archiving class WORKITEM were implemented within the Archive Development Kit (ADK) for work items. Users of this function should first make themselves familiar with the ADK (for example, via the online documentation).
To delete work items via the ADK, an archiving file must first be created. The work items stored in this archiving file can then be deleted in a second step via the ADK. The archiving and the deletion of work items via the ADK is described in detail in the online documentation for Workflow.
When archiving, it should be noted that attachments for a work item are not archived as well, but are deleted from the database in the deletion step which possibly follows.
The history for a work item and the step log for a workflow are deleted automatically when you use the ADK.
For reasons of consistency it is not possible to reload the archived data from the archive to the original database tables since the numbers of the archived work items are used again at a later date. Therefore, new data could be overwritten with old values during the reload.
However, it is possible to read the data in internal tables for possible separate evaluations. Report RSWWARCR is an easy example of such a read program. This report is considered as a templated for reading reports created by the customer in accordance with his requirements.
The actual data readback happens via the function module SWW_WI_LIST_ARCHIVED_READ.