Remove recipients from agents via command line?

Question

We are having hundreds of agents which contain e.g. outdated email addresses and/or inactive AD users (due to different reasons). Now want to fully remove the recipients from the list of recipients. Within the xml I noticed two tags, specificRecipients and emailRecipients. Example: unsafe:saw:specificRecipients ← REMOVE unsafe:saw:emailRecipients ← REMOVE So, in this example we want to remove: - good.employeeleft and - outdatedmail@somewhere.com via command line, I guess there is no other option. We need to execute this for hundreds of agents. I used runcat replace but this is just replacement (error logs are still messing up with errors). Do you know a better way to remove users/email-addresses from the agent xml?

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

Can also work, yes (as you did just make sure to not break the XML, but otherwise it's fine).

Just keep in mind that runcat works online in OAS, and therefore it is limited to the permissions of the user you used to connect.

If you want to run it over the whole catalog, including personal folders and other paths your user isn't allowed to go to, you would need to export a snapshot, extract it to have the catalog on disk and run runcat in offline mode (and then pack the BAR back into a single file, import the BAR and deploy it).

Christian Lex · Answer

I have now tested "runcat -cmd replace" using a xml file as inputFile. The xml content is like: So I am replacing tag "…specificRecipients…" containing the string "good.employeeleft" with nothing. That works, and I am not getting any error in the log. So will use that for mass change.

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

OAS, therefore as you say the catalog is now in the database.

First of all: this isn't a supported way of modifying catalog objects (I have to write this first)

There is also a checksum that is calculated on the content field and it's stored in a column of that same table (if not wrong, didn't look into it for some time now), and the first X bytes of the content stored in a different table and things like that.

You should make sure to have a working backup of your database tables, and do the changed with OAS stopped, just to avoid somebody or something accessing the catalog objects while you are working on it.

From there "it's just SQL" (as it can work on XML directly).

Make sure to double-test your code first on an object or two. It will work, and as long as you respect the the various rules of the catalog in the database, your system will not even be aware you modified something (therefore the "not support" isn't visible and your system will still be fully supported).