DRM Import From Tables

For this post, I thought I’d take a look at DRM imports. Now we are all familiar with text imports, so I thought I’d look at how DRM imports work against relational tables (a new-ish feature). This is something developers had been asking for a long time. Just like text imports, imports from relational tables utilize the same sections as imports from text files.

I’ve set up a couple of tables in Oracle to illustrate this. This first one sets up the hierarchy section (just like the one we are used to seeing when importing from a text file).

The second one sets up the relationship import section mimicking the parent child relationships between nodes. I’ve also added a description column.

Of course, if you have other sections such as version or node, you would have to add them as separate tables. So, the takeaway is that you would need multiple tables to set up different import sections.

Now, let’s set up a DRM import that loads the tables. You’ll need to set up an external connection to point to the tables. Once you’ve selected the external connection, you will see that the import tabs change, a little bit. Each source object will need to point to a table that associates to that section.

I’ll set up the sections by pointing to the right source tables:

Once you’ve set up the appropriate properties for the import sections, you will notice that there is a new section in the Columns tab, called Database Options:

On this tab, you will be able to set up the property to source column relationships.

For now, let’s assume these are all the sections we need to fill out (of course after including the version name) and let’s save and run the import. And voila, the hierarchy gets created.

This has to be one of the best improvements with the DRM product over the last few years. Think about the possibilities…you could import directly from EBS hierarchy tables or from a data warehouse. Importing from views is also possible starting in version 11.1.2.4 (a feature that I love). This is something we will tackle in another post.