How to find out the timestamp of the oldest send order in the KCS short term archive

Issue

If you want to migrate a KCS system of an existing customer to a newer hardware or operating system, it is also important to analyze how the customer uses the KCS system today to get an idea how the configuration (size of the KCS file structure, size of the KCS short term archive) of the new system must be setup to fulfill the customer’s expectation to the system.

One information, which is important to know, is the timespan of the current KCS file structure, that means you want to know how long are the messages kept in the KCS short term archive before they are deleted. It is easy the find out the most recent message, but it is hard to find out the time stamp of the oldest message stored in the KCS short term archive (scrolling down until you reach the oldest entry can take hours)

Is there any tool available to get the time stamp of the oldest send order and the time stamp of the oldest message (where the message content is still available) stored in the KCS short term archive?

Solution

TCOSS stores this information about used system resources in an internal container.

You can use TCOSS Webservices (TWS) to view this information:

• Connect with your webbrowser to the Monitoring page of the machine running TWS: http(s)://hostnameOfTWS:25082/file/index.html
• On the left pane select the function “Test Server”
• Open the drop down box with the label “Template” and select the function “TCSI read system resources”
• Press the button “Show XML Result”

• In the lower pane of the Explorer Window you will get the result in XML format
• Navigate the mouse cursor to the scrollbar on top of this lower pane. The mouse cursor changes to an up-down- arrow and you can move the mouse cursor upwards to get a larger view of the pane
• In the XML result you will find an element name <c:set_state_archive> and within this XML element you will find two additional elements named <c:time_oldest_entry> and <c:time_oldest_env>
• <time_oldest_entry> is the time stamp of the oldest send order in the KCS short term archive while
  <time_oldest_env> is the time stamp of the oldest message stored in the KCS short term archive.
  In this example you see that the oldest send order in the short term archive has a newer date 140105:074250 than the oldest message in the short term archive 131106:103712

Please NOTE:  If you view the messages in the Outbox of the KCS Client, you can only scroll down to the oldest send order, you cannot view message contents of archived messages, which are older than the oldest send order. On the other hand, if the time stamp of the oldest message is younger than the time stamp of the oldest send order, you will be only able to open the messages contents of those message having the oldest message time stamp <time_oldest_env>. All remaining send orders, older than the oldest message, will show an error message that the original message content has been already removed.

Alternative solution

If the customer does not use TWS there is also an alternative method to get this information using the attached TFC script: KCSLatestEntryInShortTermArchive.vbs

• Copy the script to a machine where the KCS Clients (TCFW) is installed
• Double click the script
• It will show you a login dialog as it is shown within the KCS TCFW client:
• Login with a user having TECH rights (e.g. TCTECH). The script uses a TCFW registration type for login.
• Similar to TWS the script will retrieve the same information <time_oldest_entry> and <time_oldest_env> and will display the time stamps in a small message box:

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Windows Script Host
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Time stamp of the oldest send order in the short term archive: 210722:134750
Time stamp of the oldest message in the short term archive: 190608:081644
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OK
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Level of Complexity 

Moderate

Applies to  

References

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