App to prune messages 3 days old

[tbeaver]

I have ran into an issue, I hope that some of you can be of some assistance and shed some light onto my "solution that has not yet been figured out".

We are currently running BES 4.1.4.2, latest version, and 90% of our phones are Blackberry 7100i's. Due to a specific hardware feature on the 7100's, we are unable to upgrade the device itself for approximately 1 year or longer, also pending budget approval and a 6 month waiting process just to purchase new devices, blah blah blah. If anyone here is an admin at a company you know my story.

Most of you know that 7100's are restricted to an OS version of 4.1.X. The problem occurs when we have a policy in BES that we would like to implement, "Keep Message Duration". This policy pushes a setting to every device registered with our Blackberry Server and causes all messages to be pruned that are X days old, causing only X days of emails and text messages to be kept on the device at any given time.

7100's are restricted to OS 4.1.X and BES requires devices to have version 4.2.X or higher to implement this policy.

I have already started a thread on the BES section of this forum and no one has any other solution that deals directly with BES.

I have performed a small amount of server-side programming in the past, basic PERL and PHP on Linux, so I am somewhat familiar with development. We also have a small team of C# developers that create all of our internal programs, ticketing systems, server scripts, etc.

From my understanding, C# and Java are fairly similar, and the Blackberry programming language is just a stripped down version of the language, version 1.3 I believe with a limited set of classes?

At any rate, how feasible is it to assign our developers a project to write a simple over the air Blackberry application that will auto prune all messages 3 days or older?

Is this too complicated to perform? For a team of two or three people, how long would it take, in your opinion?

Anyone have any ideas on how this could be done?


Thanks!

[simon.hain]

i would not assign 3 people to a small project like this, too much overhead. a single developer should manage this task. without any java experience it is not easy but should be manageable.

you can access the mail folder (see developer guides and get all messages from it. each message has a received-date. iterate through all messages and delete all with a certain date.

put all of this into a system module/autostart application, call a timertask and let it repeat once a day, for example.

[tbeaver]

Thank you very much for the information. I am sure this will give one of our developers a push in the right direction. I'm definitely glad to hear its feasible for someone to accomplish.

Just to clarify, you recommend something like the following:
* Use a script that accesses the mail folder
* Run a routine that checks the current date(A) and reads the date of all messages in the folder(B)
* Run a routine that deletes all messages that are 4,320 minutes (for example) or older by comparing the difference between A and B.
* Embed this into an "auto-run" application that initializes at least once a day, on startup or basically anytime we feel like having it run.

If anyone has a better method, I'd love to hear it!

Thanks again for your help, simon.