Collections provide a valuable tool for data maintenance tasks. Collections are containers for storing sets of objects from Tree and System Setup, independently of their placement in the hierarchies. A collection can be created via a search or import, and all objects in a collection can be updated at the same time. Collections and collection groups are found in the Collections hierarchy on the Tree tab.
When multiple collections need to be grouped together, they can be put into a 'collection group'. Collection groups can also hold other collection groups. Refer to Creating Collections (here) or Creating Collection Groups (here) in this documentation for more information on each topic.
For more on data maintenance of collections and collection groups, refer to the Maintaining Collections topic here.
Temporary Collections
The Temporary Collections node is system-generated to store read-only collections created by a process, such as bulk update background processes, exports, profiles, and Web UI basket. The right-click menu on this node does not allow manual creation of new user collections nor deletion of existing temporary collections.
Temporary collections created by background processes (BGPs) are deleted automatically via the case-sensitive sharedconfig.properties file entry AutoDeleteBackgroundProcesses.AgeInHours.[processname]=[hours] when the BGPs are deleted. In this setting, the [processname] designation is replaced with the name of the BGP and the [hours] designation is how long to wait before deleting BGPs. For more information on this setting property, refer to the Create a Background Processes Maintenance Plan topic within the System Administration documentation here.
For example, running a bulk update BGP creates three temporary collections. Setting the AutoDeleteBackgroundProcesses property with 'BulkUpdate' as [processname] allows the related bulk update temporary collections to be deleted when the bulk update BGPs are deleted, based on the [hours] setting.
Manually deleting temporary collections is necessary when background processes have been manually deleted. On the Maintain menu, click 'Force Delete & Purge' and select one of the following options:
- 'Purge collection contents' - removes the contents of the collection but does not remove the root node.
- 'Purge collection node' - removes the contents of the collection and also deletes the collection root node.
Dimension Dependency and Collections
Collections and search results are dimension dependent. A search in one context can display different objects than the same search in another context.
The following example illustrates how creating a collection from search results can return different objects, based on the dimension dependent values in the context being searched.
This search is performed in the 'English US' context for the value 'red' in the 'Color (Color)' attribute. The search finds four objects with the value.
One of those objects has a translated value of 'rojo' for the language dimension point in the 'US Spanish' context. the other objects have no value for the attribute.
Performing the search again in the 'US Spanish' context returns no records since the value of 'red' does not exist for any of the records in the searched context.
