Optional - Dovetail Data Restriction Support

Dovetail Software products Dovetail Agent and Dovetail Mobile Agent support a database partitioning technique called Data Restriction. This technique allows a single database to be partitioned into logical, virtual databases. If your organization is using Dovetail's Data Restriction feature you will likely want your search results to be logically partitioned in the same way.

How Data Restriction Works

Data Restrictions are implemented by including five restriction fields in every table or view to be restricted. These fields are always named x_res1 through x_res5. A Dovetail application will add criteria to every database query based on the restriction group of the current user.

When indexing Dovetail database content, using Dovetail document specifications, you need to include these five Data Restriction fields in your search index. This allows searches against your Dovetail index content to be restricted in a similar manner as is done with database queries.

Adding Support For Data Restriction to Dovetail Seeker

We have included example Dovetail Document Specifications for customers using data restrictions. These example specifications add the five data restriction fields to custom fields named res1 through res5. Adding data restriction support for most document specifications simply requires that you un-comment the custom data restriction fields.

Note: Whitespace in the data restriction custom field XML is meaningful.
Please ensure that there is no spacing in the data restriction custom fields.
Search Client Support

The latest versions of Dovetail Agent and <mobileapp> include search clients which support Data Restricted search indexes. These search clients detect which of your document specifications have the tag containing the term dataRestricted. When this term is present data restriction criteria will be automatically added to search request for that search domain.

Some data restricted specificaitons require schema changes. For these you will need to Update the Clarify Schema.

Note: It is important that all data restricted document
specifications contain the tag "dataRestricted".

Update the Clarify Schema

When using data restrictions with Dovetail Seeker it is required to update your Clarify Schema. You can change the Clarify schema with either Dovetail's SchemaEditor or Clarify's DDEditor.

Prior to making schema changes, backup the current database.

To make these changes using Dovetail SchemaEditor:
  1. Edit the .SchemaEditor file
    • Set the database connection information.
    • Set the inputFilePath to datarestriction.schemascript.xml
  2. Preview the changes (SchemaEditor.exe -p).
  3. Apply the changes (SchemaEditor.exe -a).
To make these changes using Clarify DDEditor:
  1. Start the DDEditor program.
  2. To save a copy of the database schema to disk, select Save.
  3. Edit the saved schema file.
  4. Edit the datarestriction.sch file. Follow the directions in that file to cut/paste the schema changes into the saved schema file.
  5. Use the Apply Changes menu item to compile the new saved schema file.
  6. Exit DDEditor.