SQL Server's running replication may fail if Process Director is upgraded in a way that alters the database schema. This is because an ALTER query can't be performed on the database if replication is enabled. If the upgrade fails, you may see a SqlException error with the following message: “You can only specify the READPAST lock in the READ COMMITTED or REPEATABLE READ isolation levels”.

If the upgrade fails, perform the following procedure:

1. Set the nDBTransIsolationLevel variable in your vars file to IsolationLevel.RepeatableRead.
2. Then, click on the Verify Process Director Database Schema button in the IT Admin settings.
3. After the database schema has been verified, remove the nDBTransIsolationLevel variable from your custom vars file, and add to the top of the vars file the following line: <%@ Import Namespace=”System.Data” %>

Process Director supports Full Text Searching (FTS) of documents. It utilizes the FTS Indexing in SQL Server. The Full-Text engine must be installed, enabled and configured in SQL Server.

These steps will create a Full-Text Index in SQL Server and start the population of the index. The population needs to be run to index new documents added to the system. This can be configured to run automatically (e.g. through the scheduler), or can be configured to update the index every time a document is added/removed from the server. To perform a manual population, under the Process Director database entry, click on the [Storage] Full-Text Catalogs entry and right click on the BPLogixFTS catalog in the right side pane, and choose the menu item Start Incremental Population. On SQL Server 2008 set the Population Schedule for the new FTS index.

1. Open the SQL Server Management Studio.
2. Expand the Process Director database and right click on the tblObject table. Select the "Full-Text Index Table -> Define Full-Text Index" menu entries.
3. Using the Full-Text Indexing Wizard, select the default Unique Index by pressing the Next button.
4. Set Columns and Document Types: Under the Available columns item, select the checkbox next to bObjectData. Under the column named “Document type column” set the value to sFileType for the bObjectData row just selected. Press Next to continue.
5. Enter the appropriate change tracking. Press Next to continue.
6. Enter a catalog name (e.g. BPLogixFTS). Press Next until the wizard completes.
7. Create an optional population schedule. Press Next to continue.
8. Set IFilters: IFilters are needed to index the various document/file types. If Microsoft Office is installed on the server where Process Director is installed, an IFilter is automatically included for Office documents allowing them to be indexed. PDF documents require the Adobe Acrobat IFilter (e.g. Adobe PDF IFilter 11) to be installed. The 64-bit version of the IFilter can be downloaded from the Adobe web site. (Adobe currently bundles a 32-bit PDF IFilter with Adobe Acrobat® 11 as well as the free Adobe Reader® 11 software.) The Acrobat IFilter must be installed prior to creating the index. If the index already exists, delete it, install the Adobe IFilter and recreate the index. Additionally, the Adobe IFilter requires that the "bin" folder be added to the PATH environmental variable. For more information on the Acrobat IFilter and SQL Server see the relevant documentation from Adobe.

Windows and SQL Server will natively support .DOC, .XLS and .PPT file types, however to support .DOCX, .XLSX, and .PPTX files, you'll need to install the Office Filter pack

Refer to the vendor of the document/file format for information on IFilters, or use third party IFilter products for common file types such as ZIP, JPG and TIFF.

Refer to the SQL Server documentation for scheduling options and detailed configuration and tuning information for the full-text engine.

You should be aware, however, that FTS isn't a panacea for all text search issues. The way FTS is configured by default may result in unexpected search results if you aren't aware of the default configuration. For example, when using FTS on SQL Server there is a default list of “Stop Words” that Microsoft identifies as items that are not significant when doing FTS indexing. So, by default, if you are searching for something like “Activity 1” using FTS, SQL Server will not find it using the following syntax:

SELECT tblObject.oDID FROM tblObject WHERE CONTAINS(bObjectData, N'"%Activity 1%*"')

But if you were searching for “Activity 1A”, that would work using the same syntax:

SELECT tblObject.oDID FROM tblObject WHERE CONTAINS(bObjectData, N'"%Activity 1A%*"')

Why? Because the indexing lists the trailing number (1) in the first example in the ‘system’ Stop Word list, and so does not include the trailing number as part of the search criterion in the first example.

To see what Stop Word list is used by tblObject, issue this SQL command:

SELECT
    ft_c.name AS [Catalog],
    s.name AS [Schema],
    o.name AS [Table],
    [StopList] =
    CASE
        WHEN ft_i.stoplist_id IS NULL THEN 'None'
        ELSE ISNULL(ft_sl.NAME, 'System')
    END
FROM
    sys.fulltext_indexes AS ft_i LEFT OUTER JOIN
    sys.fulltext_stoplists AS ft_sl ON ft_sl.stoplist_id = ft_i.stoplist_id INNER JOIN
    sys.fulltext_catalogs AS ft_c ON ft_c.fulltext_catalog_id = ft_i.fulltext_catalog_id INNER JOIN
    sys.objects AS o ON o.object_id = ft_i.object_id INNER JOIN
    sys.schemas AS s ON s.schema_id = o.schema_id

To see the list of all stop words for English:

SELECT * FROM sys.fulltext_system_stopwords WHERE language_id = 1033;

To turn off the use of stop words in SQL Server for tblObject:

ALTER FULLTEXT INDEX ON tblObject SET STOPLIST = OFF

To use "system" stop words in SQL Server for tblObject:

ALTER FULLTEXT INDEX ON tblObject SET STOPLIST = SYSTEM

In SQL Server 2014, Microsoft changed how SQL commands are evaluated. If, while running SQL Server 2008/2012, you created a SQL view that contains array fields for a form definition, this query will run more slowly if you subsequently upgrade your database to SQL Server 2014. This is only an issue on SQL Server 2014 with views that map columns in an array. Views that map array fields will need to be dropped and recreated after the upgrade to SQL 2014. When you recreate the view from the form definition, it will append a new "trace flags" option that will tell SQL Server 2014 to use the older logic from SQL Server 2008/2012, and eliminate the performance deficiency.

A bug in SQL Server can cause a performance problem with Knowledge Views searching for form data using "contains". To work around this, the product will now match any special wildcard characters in your search filter with any character. You can re-enable the exact matching using special characters by setting the fEnableSQLEscape Custom Variable that we created to help mitigate this SQL Server bug to 'true". The new variable exists to enable the ESCAPE, but ensure your SQL Server version is patched at the appropriate level. The variable can be enabled in the Custom Vars file in the PresetSystemVars() function.

See the MS KB article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2698639 for more information. It is important to note that the bug effects more than the SQL Server versions listed in the KB article (e.g. SQL Server 2014 is also effected).

You should, as part of your regular SQL Server maintenance, have a maintenance plan for rebuilding database indexes and statistics on a recurring basis. We recommend doing this weekly. For the “Rebuild Index Task” in SQL Server we recommend that the check box labeled “Keep index online while reindexing” is NOT checked.

On Windows 2003, the SMTP email notification can use the IIS SMTP server or Microsoft Exchange Server. If you are running Microsoft Exchange Server on Process Director host, this will be used as the SMTP host instead of the IIS SMTP Server. Microsoft Knowledge Base articles Q238956 and Q228465 have additional information regarding the configuration and troubleshooting.

To use Exchange Server you still have to install IIS SMTP. After it is installed change the "Pickup" parameter: This IIS command will display the current "Pickup" directory:

%WINDIR%\system32\inetsrv\adminsamples\ADSUTIL set SMTPsvc/1/PickupDirectory

Use the following command to change the "Pickup" directory to Exchange Server:

%WINDIR%\system32\inetsrv\adminsamples\ADSUTIL set SMTPsvc/1/PickupDirectory X:\exchsrvr\imcdata\Pickup

where X: is the drive where Exchange Server is installed. To revert back to the original IIS SMTP configuration run the "set" command again with the directory value displayed on the first command (e.g. c:\inetpub\mailroot\pickup).

On Windows 2003, "Smart Host" on the IIS SMTP Server allows the SMTP server to point to another mail server to forward its emails.

Occasionally, you may notice that Internet Information Service (IIS) loads Process Director pages very slowly. Normally when IIS starts an Application Pool, it checks the Certificate Revocation List (CRL) for managed assemblies that have an Authenticode signature to confirm that the signature is valid. Performing the CRL check requires the .NET framework to connect to the Internet to access the CRL. This can cause long delays in loading .NET applications in IIS.

Edit the Config file for ASP.NET to prevent IIS from checking the Certificate revocation List. . Turning the CRL check option off means that if a signed .NET application has it certificate revoked it will still load. This is usually fine, however, because a) you should already be properly managing the applications that are on your server, and b) anyone who has an access level that allows them to put a revoked application on your server already has enough access to perform far more malicious acts.

Open the config file for ASP.NET, which should be located in the root folder of the framework version you are using. For example, if you are running the .NET Framework v2.0, in the 64-bit environment, the config file should be found at:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\aspnet.config

Edit the Config file to stop the CRL check by adding this tag to the <runtime> section of the config file:

<generatePublisherEvidence enabled="false"/>

Some versions of Internet Explorer don't support domain names or server names with an underscore in the URL. While general browsing in IE still works, all session and browser cookies are ignored. With cookies ignored, login to Process Director using internal user names doesn't work. The product checks for underscores in the domain name to detect this problem. This is, however, a bug in Microsoft IE, not Process Director. Using Chrome, Firefox, or Safari will allow users to log in properly.

There is a known IE problem that happens when some ASP pages in IIS are running “Integrated Browser Security” (NTLM) and other pages aren't (the other pages are just using normal anonymous user access). There are bugs in the browser that can cause posted form data to be stripped. In some cases it appears whenever the client cache is cleared (which can happen automatically on occasion, with things like virus scanners). The Microsoft Knowledge base contains an article discussing the problem. There are two ways to work around this problem.

Option 1

Use Regedt32 on the client machine and go to this branch:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet

On the Edit menu, Add Value name DisableNTLMPreAuth as a type REG_DWORD and set the data value to 1 (true).

Option 2

Configure all pages in your virtual directory to use “Integrated Browser Security”. This means that the logged in users won't be running as the “anonymous” user id (IUSR_hostname), but instead the web pages will be run under the context of the authenticated user.

A user sees the error “Internet Explorer can't display the webpage” on long running web page requests. Either remove the following registry key or set it to decimal 60000 on the CLIENT PC:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ReceiveTimeout

This may need to be repeated as certain applications may reset this to a 10000 (10 seconds). If this doesn’t work, you may want to try connecting to other, smaller pages and test your internet connection.

A bug in Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge causes new windows to open behind parent windows, rather than on top of them. As a workaround, for Process Director v4.5, we have added the following line to the Custom Variables file:

bp.Vars.nFormOpenProps = FormOpenProps.UseFullScreen;

This will force JavaScript to open the new window in a maximized fashion, therefore pushing the new window to the top of the other windows.

This should be an acceptable temporary workaround until Microsoft corrects the bug.

If multiple interfaces exist and users can only access the server using one of them, you'll have to remove the “Interface URL” configuration from the installation settings. Additionally you'll have to modify all email templates to display two URL’s, one for accessing the system externally and the other for accessing the system internally.

Use proxy DNS technique that uses the same name that point to different IP’s depending on where the user is located (e.g. internal users resolve the name to the internal IP, and external users resolve the name to the Internet address).