Monitoring and repairing user and group memberships for ad hoc groups

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Generally, you should never change the user and group membership of an ad hoc group. Regardless, in previous releases there were several ways to change the membership and inadvertently render the ad hoc group incorrect. Since all ad hoc groups are shared, any change in the membership means that all subsequently created tasks (which are assigned to the same list of users and groups) are associated with the incorrect ad hoc group and its membership. However, you can monitor ad hoc groups and repair incorrect user and group memberships by adding the enable-ad-hoc-group-monitoring configuration setting to the 100Custom.xml files.

For more information about ad hoc groups, see the topic IBM Business Automation Workflow default group types.

About this task

When the enable-ad-hoc-group-monitoring configuration setting is set to the value true, the monitoring of ad hoc groups is enabled. As a result, when you create the next task with the same list of users and groups that was in use when the ad hoc group was created, the membership of the ad hoc group is compared to the current membership in the database. If the memberships do not match, any missing users and groups are automatically added to the membership of the ad hoc group and any superfluous users and groups are removed. The detection and repair actions are logged to the SystemOut.log file and are prefixed with the following text: ad-hoc group monitoring. Because incorrect user memberships in ad hoc groups should not occur, you should not enable the enable-ad-hoc-group-monitoring configuration setting unless you have noticed incorrect user or group membership for one or more ad hoc groups.

Procedure

Traditional:
To add and enable the enable-ad-hoc-group-monitoring configuration setting in the 100Custom.xml file, complete the following steps:
1. Stop the servers for Workflow Server or Workflow Center.
2. Open each 100Custom.xml file. For information about the individual 100Custom.xml files that need to be updated and their locations, see the topic Location of 100Custom configuration files.
3. In each 100Custom.xml file, add the enable-ad-hoc-group-monitoring setting and associated elements under the <properties> element, as shown in the following example:
```
<server>
   <portal>
      <enable-ad-hoc-group-monitoring merge="replace">true</enable-ad-hoc-group-monitoring>
   </portal>
</server>
```
  (If for some reason you want to later disable the monitoring of ad hoc groups, change the value to false.)
4. In each 100Custom.xml file, save your changes.
5. In a browser, open each 100Custom.xml file to ensure that it contains no special characters.
6. Complete one of the following steps:
  - In a clustered environment, ensure that the changes are propagated to the nodes by forcing a synchronization and restarting the deployment environment.
  - In a stand-alone server environment, restart the server.