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About the Symbolic String Consolidation Process

The consolidation process eliminates duplicate symbolic strings that may be created during the conversion process. Because the conversion process runs on an object type by object type basis, duplicate records can, and usually do, occur when the process creates different symbolic strings for a display value that occurs in multiple object types. Duplicate symbolic strings can have identical sets of locale records or one symbolic string may have more child locale records than the other, but the ones they have in common are identical.

Consolidation Export

The Consolidation Export process scans all symbolic string records and identifies symbolic strings whose child records are identical and then writes this information to a file. For symbolic strings that have identical child records, one of the strings will be selected arbitrarily as the master record. For symbolic strings whose child records are a subset of another symbolic string, the string with the largest number of children is selected as the master record. The export process does not modify the database.

NOTE:  The Consolidation Export file is not a log file so there is no need to review its contents.

Consolidation Import

Based on the file produced during consolidation export process, the redundant symbolic strings are eliminated, and all references to these strings from other object types are replaced with a reference to the master record. This is a time-consuming process, as there are approximately 80 translatable string attributes represented among the various object types in the repository. The end result, however, is that the symbolic string table is as compact as possible, and all redundancy has been removed.