Problem
When users attempt to move a document to a different archive or to an inbox, they get the message “Documents pending PDF conversion or workflow action are not available for this operation.”
Cause
This can happen when the Content Search service is not running as the Application Pool user. You should always be running Content Search as your App Pool user to prevent this from happening. However, even after switching to the App Pool user, stuck documents will remain stuck in PDF Pending until manually removed. Follow the directions below to remedy this.
Please Be Advised
Service Console sometimes fails to properly set Content Search as the app pool user. You may have to manually set this user via services.msc
Solution
In SQL, there will be a large number of records in the PdfPending table under the customer’s GlobalSearch database:
To determine if these documents are actually waiting to be processed or not, check the message queue for ss_fulltext in computer or server management. If you see messages queued in Message Queuing\Private Queues\ss_fulltext\Queue messages, make sure the ssContentSearch service is running before proceeding:
If no queued messages are found and if the ssContentSearch service is running, proceed to the next step.
To resolve the issue, first make a backup of the customer’s SQL database in SQL Server Management Studio.
Note: always perform a FULL backup.
After the backup has been created, run the following command – be sure that the customer’s GlobalSearch database is selected:
USE SmartSearch; truncate table [YOURDATABASENAME].[dbo].[PdfPending];
Once this has been completed, check to see if any documents remain in the PdfPending table (there should be none) and make sure documents can be moved without encountering the document action pending message.
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