Missing Files in Whitehill

For those that use Elite Document Studio by Whitehill/Skywire/Oracle Legal (whatever it's called these days) there's several moving parts that can wind up not working properly. One of these is that the document record is created in the Document_Catalog table, but the actual file doesn't make its way to the correct folder. This results in an error in Elite when trying to access an invoice pdf. So what do you do when you have a host of files missing from your bill directory, but the records are already in the Document_Catalog table (especially if only 1 of 4 converters wasn't functioning properly)?

Well, here's a solution. If you have any ideas on how to improve this, or re-write it altogether to be more efficient or effective, please share!

The first section of code here creates a temporary table and inserts into the temporary table the list of files of the targeted directory. In this case, we're looking at the bill directory on the Elite application server. You'll need to modify this path according to your environment. One note: the collation in the CREATE TABLE needs to be the same as the collation of your Document_Catalog table otherwise you may get errors when joining the two.

USE [son_db]
GO

SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO

--Drop temporary table if it already exists
IF OBJECT_ID(N'tempdb.dbo.#DirContents', N'U') IS NOT NULL 
DROP TABLE tempdb.dbo.#DirContents;
GO

--Create temporary table to store contents of directory
CREATE TABLE #DirContents (
 Line VARCHAR(512) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS NULL)

DECLARE  @PathName       VARCHAR(256) ,
         @CMD            VARCHAR(512) 

SET @PathName = '\\eliteappserver\elite\home\bill\'
 
SET @CMD = 'DIR ' + @PathName + ' /TC'
 
PRINT @CMD

INSERT INTO #DirContents
EXEC MASTER..xp_cmdshell   @CMD

The results from above should appear like this:

Database name 'tempdb' ignored, referencing object in tempdb.
DIR \\eliteappserver\elite\home\bill\ /TC

(32568 row(s) affected)

By taking a quick look at the temporary table you should see this:

Line
Volume in drive \\eliteappserver\elite\home\bill is Data_LUN72
Volume Serial Number is ABCD-E123
NULL
Directory of \\eliteappserver\elite\home\bill
NULL
07/17/2009 07:34 PM <DIR> .
07/17/2009 07:34 PM <DIR> ..
10/06/2008 01:09 PM 41,270 000001.000001.481826.10062008.pdf
09/03/2008 01:00 PM 42,434 000567.000026.471323.06052008.pdf
09/03/2008 01:00 PM 42,680 000567.000026.473887.07072008.pdf

These next few lines of code will strip out the non-file lines from the temporary table.

DELETE
FROM   #DirContents
WHERE  Line NOT LIKE '[0-9][0-9]/[0-9][0-9]/[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9] %'
OR Line LIKE '%<DIR>%'
OR Line is null

Next we need to compare the files in the directory (temp table) to the records in the Document_Catalog.

WITH realfiles AS (
SELECT
  'DocName' = REVERSE( LEFT(REVERSE(Line),CHARINDEX(' ',REVERSE(line))-1 ) ),
  'CreateDate' = LEFT(Line,10)
FROM #DirContents
WHERE LEFT(Line,10) LIKE '12/%%/2009'
),
doccatfiles AS (
SELECT
EMP_ID
,REVERSE(LEFT(REVERSE(CAST(FILE_PATH AS VARCHAR(400))),CHARINDEX('\',REVERSE(CAST(FILE_PATH AS VARCHAR(400))))-1)) AS 'DocName'
FROM Document_Catalog
WHERE FILE_DATE >= '12/1/09'
AND DESC_DATE_2 >= '12/1/09'
)
SELECT DISTINCT doccatfiles.EMP_ID
FROM doccatfiles
WHERE doccatfiles.DocName NOT IN (SELECT realfiles.DocName FROM realfiles)

Note: Since we're doing so much text manipulation and comparing long strings of text, this query is rather slow. You'll see I limited the inputs here to only December 2009 to make the information more manageable. If you have a large issue, I would recommend separating it into batches like this.

You now have a list of invoices that are missing from your bill location. You can now recap these specific invoices rather than target all within a certain date range of the error.