APEX

The export/import via an xml file should only be used when creating a new application. It is not designed to support incremental updates between environments. You will have to create the new locations manually in your Production environment and migrate the mappings by exporting to Excel and then importing to the locations in Production. Bear in mind, if your location ID's are different between environments you will need to update the excel mapping templates before importing them to your Production application

Thanks for the answer.

It seems it would be common practice to create new data load locations in a development environment first, and then have the ability to easily migrate to production. It sounds like this is not the case at all.

Am I at least able to export some other application elements like scripts into an xml and then load them safely to production?

Edited by: user3027589 on Aug 20, 2012 1:12 PM

You can do this through SQL relatively easily. I know that is not the officially supported way, though.

The key information you would need to move would be in

tPOVPartition - Holds the basic location information
tStructurPartitionHierarchy - Outlines order of locations
tStructPartitionLinks - Links Partitions together
tDatamap - If you created a mapping

If you created a new import format...
---------------
tBhvLogicGroup - Import formats
tBhvImpItemFile - Details for Import Format

If you created a validation entity group for this location
--------------------
tBhvValEntGroup - Group information
tBhvValEntItem - items for the groups

If you create a specific validation rule group
--------------
tBhvValRuleGroup
tBhvValRuleItem

Controls Group...
------------
tControlsGroup
tControlsItem
tControlsItemLink
.
.
.


The trick would be to make sure all of the supporting items exist in the destination first such as Import format, Map, Controls Group, etc. You have to BE CAREFUL because the ID in the 'dev' envirionment for these items may not match the new ID (autogenerated or you need to generate it) in the new environment. You'll need to keep note of the proper ID so that when you copy over the location, you provide the right information.

Then create the location (partition) record. Since the location table does not automatication generate the unique ID, query the table first and determine the highest unique ID, add 1, and use that when you create this record. When you create the hierarchy items, you may need to swap out the old ID with this one. Also, if the hierarchy elements don't exist in destination, you'd need to recreate that as well....

If you need security, you should be able to locate the appropriate tables.....

I'm actually in the middle of making a utility to simplify a lot of the FDM tasks to build off of some things I did at Kscope and to prepare for next year... When I get closer to having something public friendly, I'll put it out here. I think you'd appreciate it given your question. ;)

The scripts are stored on the file system in the <Appname>\Data\Scripts directory. You can easily copy these from the source environment application folder to the target environment application folder and place them in the same directory.