Documentum Foundation Services (DFS) – Best Practices

1. When setting repeating stringattributes on an object, setting with a stringarray throws an error..likelya bug, use semi-colon delimited string.
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2. QueryMaxResultCountdoes not default to -1 as the documentation states,it defaults to 100 and setting it to -1 still results in a max of 500. if you expect your query to ever exceed 500 you must cache and cycle through the results.
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3. When using UCF, you must set both the ServiceContextand the ObjectOperationsContent Transfer modes to UCF, not just one or the other as the documenationstates. We also found that when ContentTransferModewas set to UCF, custom services would return a ucferror (even if they were not doing content transfer) so I explicitly set the ServiceContextand ObjectOperationsto base64 when not doing content transfer and to UCF when doing content transfer.

4. If you need access to anything outside of a session, i.e,. list of docbases, list of network locations you must write and deploy a non-DFS based service to obtain them.
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5. Ensure you explicitly specify your propertyProfilefor querying or retrieving objects. It does not default to all properties. ie. use PropertyFilterMode: include, exclude or all.
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6. Validate the attribute names when setting/saving attributes on Createas it does not just ignore invalid names it throws an exception and fails the action without providing a coherent error message.You can use the Schema Service to validate.

7. When writing services, make sure you return DataPackagefor services that return resultsets
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8.When validating a returned DataPackage, check to see if it's NULL.If not NULL, check to see if .DataObjectsis NULL, i.e. DataPackagecanbe not NULLand still have no results.
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9.For DataObject, r_object_idis always Identity, i.e. Properties.Get("r_object_id") will not return it.
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10.Be aware of QueryExecution.MaxResultCountwhen using the Query service to run a DQL query

11. Don’t run DFS on a D5.3 Content Server (Security Issue)
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12. Session affinity still required for clustered environments –DFS sessions are still tied to the host