Cron Job: Delete old News Entries

1 Initial Problem

Over the years, a gazillion of news items accumulate in an ILIAS installation.

There is no mechanism for removing these news items automatically.

At the same time, there are frequently situations in which this unpruned volume of news items causes performance issues.

For example, pagination requires knowing the total number of news items when a page is loaded.

The ‘Developing’ section of the docu.ilias.de has recorded more than 38.200 news items since May 2008 – it is questionable whether this is really necessary.

2 Conceptual Summary

A new cron job called ‘Delete old News Items’ is to be introduced, which will automatically remove out-of-date news items according to configurable rules.

Within the cron job, it is possible to specify whether it applies to manually created news items, automatically generated news items, or both. There are no separate periods of storage.

One problem we anticipate is that the selected time period for news items to be displayed could be longer than the period for which news items are still available after deletion by cron.

Example:
 • All news items older than 6 months are deleted.
 • However, the user decides on the dashboard that all news items from the last year should be displayed.
 • The administrator sets the retention period for container objects to 1 year or no restrictions at all. 
Result: Users’ expectations regarding the data displayed may differ from the data that is actually still available.

To avoid conflicting configurations, a message box is integrated into the cron job configuration, displaying the global settings from news context.
It is the administrator’s responsibility to ensure a consistent configuration.

Cron Configuration Form (with MessageBox)

3 User Interface Modifications

3.1 List of Affected Views

3.2 User Interface Details

3.3 New User Interface Concepts

None.

3.4 Accessibility Implications

None.

4 Additional Information

4.1 Involved Authorities

If this request is related to multiple components, please list both authorities for all related components.

4.2 Technical Aspects

1) Reducing the amount of data stored and the amount of data to be processed should result in a positive impact on performance.

2) I remember that the Mediacasts seem to have dependencies on the implementation of the news. The authority for the Mediacasts, Killing, Alexander [alex], and we should have a discussion to ensure that no strange effects come to light in the Mediacast, when the cron job runs. One option would be to check ‘context object type’. The ilNewsItem gets the MediaCast type injected. We could ignore this type of object in the cronjob.

4.3 Privacy

None.
Additional deletion terms should generally have a positive impact.

4.4 Security

Nothing specific.

4.5 Contact

Person to be contacted in case of questions about the feature or for funding offers: Samoila, Oliver [oliver.samoila]

4.6 Funding

Funding status and funding parties are listed in the block 'Status of Feature' in the right column of this page.

If you are interested to give funding for this feature, please get into contact with the person mentioned above as 'Contact'.

5 Discussion

6 Implementation

Feature has been implemented by {Please add related profile link of this person}

6.1 Description and Screenshots

{ Description of the final implementation and screenshots if possible. }

6.2 Test Cases

Test cases completed at {date} by {user}

6.3 Privacy

Information in privacy.md of component: updated at {date} by {user} | no change required

6.4 Approval

Approved at {date} by {user}.