One of the great things with Act! is the ability to attach files to any entity like a Contact, Company or Opportunity etc. We received a database recently from client that they wanted cleansed, upgraded and re-designed. As this dB was quite an old system that had “been through the wars” and several upgrades over the years (I think it started life as an Act! 2000 dB!) there was a fair amount of cleansing to do for us within the tech team.
dB cleansing is usually not only a complex task but also time intensive where we run a dB through various internal tools and scripts developed by us over the years. One region within most Act! dBs that requires our intense gaze is upon the Activities and then the Attachments as these sections touch so many areas with an Act! dB.
One interesting thing about Act! attachments is that when you delete a Contact, the attached files within the dB are not physically removed from the system. Attached files reside in the Attachments folder of the supplemental folders, e.g. if your dB is called Act2014Demo at the location of the ADF and ALF files you will find a folder called .\ACT2014Demo-database files and within that a folder named Attachments.
Act! supplemental folders
It is generally accepted as a rule of thumb to carry out system purging of cleared activities etc on a fairly regular basis to reduce lock-ups in the dB and negative impacts on overall dB performance, unfortunately there is no native facility to remove unattached or orphaned files from the Attachments folder. Having too many orphaned files not only is a waste of physical space on your hard drive, but can also slow Act! down since the Indexing server within Act! that allows you to perform Universal Searches will list and index the contents of these orphaned files as well.
The real problem comes in trying to work out which files are correctly attached and which are not so the following simple script shows an example of a SQL statement that lists all the files that are currently not attached to a record in Act! and so can be safely removed.
declare @files table (ID INT IDENTITY, Filename varchar(250)) insert into @files execute master.dbo.xp_cmdshell 'DIR "C:\Users\Public\Documents\ACT\ACT Data\Databases\ACT2014Demo-database files\Attachments\" /a /b' select F.Filename[OrphanFiles], (select COUNT(F.filename) from @files[F] where F.Filename not in (select DISPLAYNAME from TBL_ATTACHMENT))[OrphanCount] from @files[F] where F.Filename not in (select DISPLAYNAME from TBL_ATTACHMENT)
What’s interesting here is that you can ask SQL to run a cmd line utility to list the contents of a folder. There are many DBAs that would balk at the idea of leaving this security gap wide open, however since we are working in the “lab” this is something that we do fairly routinely. If this ability has been turned off, then your only option then is to create a custom CLR for your SQL instance which is quite a bit more involved.
What we usually do with this SQL statement is embed it within a Powershell script with literates through the file list and deletes each file. The result is an Act! dB with a nice new hair-cut.
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