Updating a large quantity of existing documents with new Auto Name

[Eric_Nelson1]

I am adding an existing keyword to the Auto Name structure for a document type. I know that any new documents will take on the new name. However, I have roughly 160,000 existing OnBase documents that I need to update with a new Auto Name also.

I know there is an option when you change the Auto Name of a Document Type to "Rename All Documents of This Document Type."

My questions are:

• Is it possible to rename all 160,000 documents at once without it having a negative impact on the system? I'm planning on doing this after hours but still would not want this to bring the system down due to the volume.
• How long would the process take to rename all of the documents?
• Is there a better way to do this? I believe there is a workflow action that can be used to update a document's name. Would it be better to run this behind a timer?

Thanks for any suggestions.
Eric

[Nick_McElheny · Accepted solution]

Hi Eric,

From my personal experience, I would definitely ensure that you target the "Rename All Documents of This Document Type" from Config for after hours or during a weekend window when batches aren't being committed.  I did this with a few document types in the past and the document types were large enough that it spilled in to the day - I ended up finding that a small number of newly scanned documents ended up in the Committed Queue, but weren't retrievable through search as their hsi.itemdata status did not get updated properly during the commit process.  I ended up having to work with Tech Support to correct the identified documents.  It's tough to gauge how long the update process will take as it's heavily dependent on your environment.  160,000 doesn't sound like a lot of documents especially if you have a decent maintenance window at night or over a weekend, but the best way would probably be to perform the auto-name update in your test environment first to get a feel for how long it will take when you do it in production.  As you mentioned, sending these documents to Workflow in chunks and using the update name action is another alternative.  My experience above might be an anomaly and you might be fine if the update spills in to business hours while batches are being committed, but since encountering that issue I've always been a little more cautious with this process.

I hope this helps.

Nick McElheny 

[Eric_Nelson1]

Thanks Nick!

I did the rename process from config in my DEV environment. We had about 130,000 documents there. I would say that it took a solid 9 hours to complete. It looks like it all completed fine. These documents don't come in through batch processing, so I guess it wouldn't be terrible if it spilled over into the workday.

I'll probably just do this over a weekend when we don't have a lot of users in the system. That way it shouldn't negatively impact my users.

Thanks again for the information!
Eric