About custom filtering ruleset files

You create filter rules and actions in XML ruleset files. A ruleset file contains one or more rules.

Each rule contains the following:

A set of one or more attribute filters for evaluating each item that the archiving task processes. The order of attribute filters in a rule is not significant, as all the attribute filters are evaluated.
An action to be applied to an item that matches all the attribute filters in the rule. Examples of actions are applying a particular retention category or storing the item in a specified archive. More than one action can be applied to matching items.

Although the order of the attribute filters in a rule is not significant, the order of the rules in the ruleset file is significant. The rules are evaluated in the order in which they appear in the file. The action associated with the first matching rule is applied to the item, and no further rules are evaluated for that item. If none of the rules match the item, the default action is to archive the item.

An item may be a message or an attachment. If a message has an attachment, the message is evaluated first, and then the attachment is evaluated.

Tip: By default items that do not match any rules are archived. If you want to archive only items that match a rule, then create a "catch-all" rule as the last rule in the ruleset file. Assign the action "MARK_DO_NOT_ARCHIVE" to this last rule. You can create a "catch-all" rule using message direction attributes, for example.

See Message direction filters.

All ruleset files must be available in the folder Custom Filter Rules in the main Enterprise Vault folder (typically C:\Program Files\Enterprise Vault) on the computer hosting the archiving tasks that are enabled for custom filtering.

After Enterprise Vault has been installed, this folder contains the following XML files:

Example Filter Rules.xml - This provides examples of filter rules.
ruleset schema.xdr - This contains the XML schema for validating the XML ruleset files.
Example Custom Properties.xml - This provides example entries for the custom properties.xml file.
customproperties.xsd - This contains the XML schema for validating the custom properties XML file.

When you modify a ruleset file, you must restart the associated archiving tasks to pick up the changes. In a distributed environment, you must copy the updated file to each computer with tasks enabled for custom filtering, and then restart the associated tasks on each computer.

Note:

It is important to set permissions on the ruleset files to prevent unauthorized editing. For increased security, you could also enable Windows file auditing on these files.