Best practices for updating property values in bulk

Siemens Digital Industries Software recommends observing the following best practices: Do not perform this operation when users are accessing Teamcenter data. If objects specified for update are locked by other processes, the update process is impacted. To determine all the current values of attributes you plan to update, with the tc_attribute_bulk_update utility, use the -untransformed switch with either the -inputfile argument containing only condition property/value entries (no update entries) or the -cond_prop and -cond_value arguments. To validate the schema of the XML input file, use the -performSchemaValidation switch. If the schema is invalid, the following information is added to the log file: Error: attributeUpdateSchemaValidator: XML Exception during schema file validation. If the schema is not found, the following information is added to the log file: Error: AttributeUpdateSchemaValidator: Unable to find schema file for validation. To confirm the updates were made as expected, specify an output directory with the -outdir argument so that you can review the output log. Because extensive updates are time-consuming, Siemens Digital Industries Software recommends you determine the following before performing a complex bulk update of property values: Affected targets Run the tc_attribute_bulk_update utility with the -queryonly switch to determine the number of target objects affected by the proposed update. When you specify this switch, the utility does not perform the update, it merely reports the number of affected objects. This switch outputs the number of target objects affected by the specified update parameters to a log file. If the number of objects is less than 100, the object UIDs are included in the log file. Use this switch in conjunction with either the input file or the condition and update arguments to determine how many objects are affected by the specified update operation. You can use the resulting information to determine batch size and to estimate the duration of the update operation. Duration To estimate the duration of various update operations, see the performance tables. If the estimated time is considerable, there are three methods for managing the operation duration. Run the tc_attribute_bulk_update utility with the -batchsize argument to specify the number of objects to update in each batch operation per TC XML file. The default batch size is 500. This is also the maximum batch size. Run the tc_attribute_bulk_update utility with the -islandsize argument to specify the number of islands to update in each operation. Islands tie logically related objects together. The data in low-level TC XML is grouped into an island by closure rules. The default size is 100. Manage the number of objects processed per update by running multiple updates constrained by dates. The updates can be run in parallel. For example: First update -cond_prop="last_mod_date" -cond_value="01-DEC-2010 00:00" -cond_operator="LT" Second update -cond_prop="last_mod_date" -cond_value="01-DEC-2011 00:00" -cond_operator="LE" -cond_prop="last_mod_date" -cond_value="01-DEC-2010 00:00" -cond_operator="GE" Third update -cond_prop="last_mod_date" -cond_value="01-DEC-2011 00:00" -cond_operator="GT"