Announcement is not expiring even after given closing date

Products

• CA Service Desk Manager
• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

Had set the closing date for a given announcement.  Even after closing date/time the announce remains visible in the announcement page.

This was working in r17.2.  After upgrading to 17.3 it is not working.

Cause

In the stdlogs, one may also find the following logging present, which names the cnote.spl file (spel file used with Animator to process expiration of an Announcement):

01/01 15:27:48.72 SERVER1 spelsrvr                7624 ERROR        cnote.spl              109 ERROR checking in new Animator dob: INVALID

The cause of the issue is internal to the Animator lacking a required field on its end to process the announcement's expiration, causing the announcement not to expire.  It is an issue found specifically in 17.3 GA implementations.

Environment

Release : 17.3 GA

Component : SERVICE DESK MANAGER

Resolution

The latest RU patch addresses the issue.  As of this writing, the latest 17.3 RU patch is RU4.

Additional Information

After applying the RU patch to address the issue, to remove any remaining Announcements that have not expired and need to be removed, please perform the following:

- Back up the given MDB database

- In an Admin command prompt on the SDM Server, run this command to back up the Announcements table:

pdm_extract Note_Board > noteboard-backup.dat

- Next, run this command to obtain all active Announcements that have an expiration date

pdm_extract -f "Select active_flag, id, close_date, posted_date, text from Note_Board where active_flag = 1 and close_date != ''" > modify-noteboard1.dat

- Open the output file "modify-noteboard1.dat" in a text editor.  It will contain content such as this:

TABLE Note_Board
 active_flag id close_date posted_date text 
 { "1" ,"400001" ,"01/01/2021 15:29:00" ,"01/11/2021 15:27:48" ,"test" }

- Modify the file such that the first flag for "active" is changed from "1" to "0" for each entry you want to be inactivated/removed (example text change in italics and underline below)

TABLE Note_Board
 active_flag id close_date posted_date text 
 { "0" ,"400001" ,"01/01/2021 15:29:00" ,"01/11/2021 15:27:48" ,"test" }

Note:  Please be careful at this step as some announcements entries in this extract file may still be valid and active.  Please be sure to change ONLY the announcements that were affected by this scenario.

- Save the modify-noteboard1.dat file

- Run this command to update the Announcements table with the change

pdm_load -f modify-noteboard1.dat

The above should be tried in a testing environment to familiarise with the process before attempting in production.  We recommend performing the above change in a prod environment during low times of production, during a scheduled maintenance.

Support does not advise using the above commands to make direct changes to the announcements table.