B DSA Format

This appendix describes the format of the Endeca Connector DSA that will be called by the Endeca Connector Adapter; the DSA must be in format described.

Inputs

• ID - The name of the ID field in the input data.

• ROUTEINFO - The ”hint” used to more efficiently route the data.

• DESC1 - The name of the first description field in the input data.

• DESC2 - The name of the second description field in the input data.

• ALT1 - First alternate data field (mfgName).

• ALT2 - Second alternate data field (mfgPartNo).

• ALT3 - Third alternate data field (user-defined).

The DSA need not use every one of these inputs if they are not needed. In fact, if only the Id and Description are needed (for testing for instance), then just pass an empty Route Info field through your DSA and just skip the other inputs past the 1st description. The DSA only extracts the number of fields that it needs.

Oracle recommends that exceptions be trapped in the DSA, rather than just dropping these records, so that you can route the records that were not processed to a location where they can be used to enhance the parsing and attribute extraction of the data lenses.

Outputs

• ID - This is used by the Endeca Connector Adapter to associate the transformed data with the original data.

• Return Value 1 - This information is passed back to Endeca

• Return Value 2 - This information is passed back to Endeca

• Return Value 3 - This information is passed back to Endeca

• Key/Value pairs defining the attribute - These are the attributes that are mapped to the Endeca Dimensions.

Note:

There is no Quality Index (QI) component in the input data, or in the output data. The QI checks can be performed in the DSAs to control the routing.

Underscores and Spaces

The Endeca Connector Initialization programs will get the attribute names from the Item Definition Attribute Aliases in each of the data lenses. The Endeca Connector will then standardize all the alias names to be proper cased (if the REPLACE_UNDERSCORES_ONLY flag is set to false) and will always replace any of the underscores with spaces. This prevents the user from needing to match the case of all the aliases between all the item definitions in all the individual data lenses. This also makes the names with underscores more presentable to end users in the Web application (for example, Diagonal_Screen_Size to Diagonal Screen Size.)

The Endeca Connector Adapter (PdqAdapter Java Manipulator as called from the Endeca Forge process), will also proper case (if the REPLACE_UNDERSCORES_ONLY flag is set to false), and will always replace underscores when processing the data.

Attribute Aliases

The discovery process for the data lens attributes will always retrieve the attribute alias. If the attribute alias is not defined, then it will use the attribute name.

This means that when the Endeca Connector Adapter is running, it also needs to retrieve the attribute alias (if it exists) so that the Endeca Connector Discovery process and the Endeca Connector Adapter (run during the Forge processing) are in sync and will work properly.

This means that the following check box must be selected in your Transform Maps that are called by the main DSA used by the adapter.