Registry-Cleanup utility and the XML which drives it!

registry-cleanup: It can be used to cleanup the bad entries in the Shared Services Registry. There is no harm of running this utility as a regular cleanup process. This utility runs on the basis of some rules which are passed to the utility using a xml, but default it uses the default-rules.xml file present at following location:

MIDDLEWARE_HOME\EPMSystem11R1\common\config\11.1.2.0\resources\registry\cleanup

There are six default rules in the default-rules.xml file, these are: 
1. Remove components without parent HOST node, 
2. Remove APP_SERVER components with just HOST components in parents,
3. Remove components without any children or parent nodes,
4. Remove HOST to HOST links,
5. Remove webapps with invalid ‘serverName’ property,
6. Merge duplicate webapps.

If you look at the xml and investigate the first rule:

 <rule description="Remove components without parent HOST node">
        <delete>
            <component>
                <parents match="false">
                    <component>
                        <type>HOST</type>
                    </component>
                </parents>
            </component> 
        </delete>
        <skip> 
            <component>
                <type>SYSTEM9</type>
            </component>
            <component> 
                <type>FOUNDATION_SERVICES_PRODUCT</type>
            </component>
            <component>
                <type>SHARED_SERVICES_PRODUCT</type>
            </component> 
            <component>
                <type>HOST</type>
            </component>
        </skip>
    </rule>

Here its trying to check if the Parents match is false for any component then perform delete action, of course there are few exception in the Skip section.

Please go to the above mentioned location to find more about other rules.

We can find this utility at: MIDDLEWARE_HOME\user_projects\epmsystem1\bin\registry-cleanup.bat|sh

If we want to create of our rules, yes we can do it, Here is a document (Doc ID 1482499.1) which talks about an issue where the configuration of Web Analysis was failing with new database, here registry-cleanup utility did the trick, we provided following .xml to delete the registry information for Web Analysis and then installation went fine:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<rules xmlns="http://www.hyperion.com/hit/registry" xmlnssi="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.hyperion.com/hit/registry registry-cleanup-schema.xsd"> 


    <rule description="Cleanup Reporting and Analysis Components"> 
        <delete> 
            <component> 
                <type>AGENT</type> 
            </component> 
            <component> 
                <type>AGENT_MODULE</type> 
            </component> 
            <component> 
                <type>RA_SERVICE</type> 
            </component> 
            <component> 
                <type>RA_LSM</type> 
            </component> 
            <component> 
                <type>EVENT_MONITOR</type> 
            </component> 
            <component> 
                <type>MANAGED_PROCESS</type> 
            </component> 
            <component> 
                <type>DAS_DSN</type> 
            </component> 
            <component> 
                <type>PROPERTY</type> 
            </component> 
        </delete> 
    </rule> 
</rules>

Web Analysis - Reporting And Analysis Configuration with New Database Fails (Doc ID 1482499.1)

Also I have found a document which talks about the an issue which few of our clients have faced:

Error: "reg.properties not configured" When Executing The Registry Cleanup Utility (Doc ID 1491854.1)

Cheers..!!!
Rahul S.