A HouseKeeper helps to keep everything neat and tidy, spick and span.
A HouseKeeper cleans up after you.
The fatgeorge HouseKeeper for XMod cleans up after you in XMod; removing those orphaned fileuploads taking up vital and costly disk space on your server, maintaining the parent/child relationship of records, removing the forgotten about expired records.
Lighten the load and let the fatgeorge HouseKeeper look after your XMod applications.
FileUpload Audit
Ever since we created the fatgeorge fileupload add-in for XMod people have been asking for a way to remove orphaned uploaded files.
Let me explain the problem, when an XMod record is deleted there is no process in the background to remove any uploaded files. So the record gets deleted and all looks good but your precious disk space is slowly but surely disappearing. The same applies to expired records, you can configure XMod so that records disappear from your list view when the ExpiryDate is met but the records are still there and so are any uploaded files.
The solution? Create a background process to monitor fileuploads; create a link between the uploads and their associated XMod record; maintain the status of uploaded files and the corresponding XMod record.
And finally remove uploaded files when it is safe to do so in a controlled manageable way.
Parent/Child Relationship Audit
It is possible in XMod to create a parent/child relationship however, there is no cascading delete functionality in XMod so when you delete the parent record the child records are left behind.
Now HouseKeeper will monitor and audit these Parent/Child relationships and when a parent record is deleted it ensures that all it's child records are also deleted.
Works in conjunction with the fileupload audit ensuring that any uploaded files belonging to parent or child records are removed from your filestore.
Configuration:
No change required to your XMod forms, simply add your ParentXModID REF to the 'fgfu_HouseKeeper_PC' list in the DNN Lists table ('ParentID' ref is added during install)
Expired Records Removal
Once XMod records reach their expiry date and disappear from your list view it is easy to forget about them, like any other data if these build up they will take up valuable space in your database and affect performance.
If those expired records also have uploaded files associated with them then you are also losing your costly disk space.
With HouseKeeper you can configure a scheduled job which will remove any expired records, you can set a grace period on the ExpiredDate and it will work in conjunction with the FileUpload Audit to remove any associated uploaded files.
Buck's Review:
When working with XMod applications we were constantly performing a manual clean up of the DotNetNuke File Manager to reduce our storage space by removing orphaned files.
With Housekeeper we can know schedule the files to be removed automatically.
This became especially useful for the DNN Professor Business Directory where the user is billed on a monthly basis for an enhanced listing. If the lister decides not to renew their listing, you simply delete the Xmod listing and let Housekeeper do the cleanup for you.
It saves us storage space. It saves us many hours of manual cleanup.
I worked closely with Tony Harrison, from the FatGeorge company, requesting additional features to the Housekeeper control.
On our production sites, we use either the Ventrian Subscription Tool that is included with Scott McCulloch's Gold Membership subscription or the DataSprings Dynamic Registration module to allow directory subscribers to signup for adding a directory listing through PayPal.
Both of these products perform this task and after successful subscription purchase the subscriber is placed in a DNN security role that we have configured, in XMod, to have permission to add a directory listing.
In addition to the features that exist in Housekeeper, I needed a method to set a XMod record to unapproved or expired when a subscriber had canceled their listing subscription and was removed from the security role that was allowed to add/edit a listing.
Tony came through and the current version of Housekeeper now allows the listing to be removed from view when the user is no longer in the allowed DNN security role. This is all accomplished behind the scenes on a scheduled basis.
I highly recommend the product to anyone using XMod.