Deleting several controlled queues in Watchdoc

Context

You want to delete several queues controlled by Watchdoc.

Procedure

At the moment, there is no dedicated tool to delete queues in bulk. To do that, do as following:

  1. save a backup copy of the \data\config.xml file

  2. open a text editor (like Sublime Text or Notepad++, for example) as administrator;

  3. open the config.xml file, specifying "UTF-8" as encoding;

  4. in this file, delete the <queue>...</queue> blocks corresponding to the queues you want to be removed;

  5. stop the Watchdoc service;

  6. save the modified config.xml file;

  7. restart the Watchdoc service.

Notes

Because of the intended purpose, there's choices when you remove a queue:

 

  • If it's a queue that was targeting a printer that is permanently removed, or replaced by another model, you want to externalize it. The queue's configuration and assets (serial number, model, vendor, capabilities and so on) will still be used to generate statistics. Otherwise it's replaced by generic data that might not match with the device's characteristics.

     

  • If it's a queue that removed to be added again later (you're troubleshooting something or you changed the printer queue's name*), you want to remove it from the configuration. If you externalize it, when adding the queue again the "queue identifier", also called "queueID", will already be taken in the configuration file so Watchdoc will suffix it with a "1". (example : "MYPRINTSERVER.MYPRINTER1"). Consequence is that Watchdoc will consider this queue as new and won't inherit the statistics of the previous one.

     

It's perfectly possible to add a queue to Watchdoc and change its queueID in the process. However you can't edit an already monitored queue's identifier.

We currently don't have tools to migrate a queue data to another queueid, but the SQL requests are quite simple for someone who would want to do it anyway.