Application Data Set Overview

Application Data Sets (ADS) provide the underlying transport technology to move, compare, validate, and merge configuration data. Configuration data includes:

• setup data

• application data

• tools configuration

• managed objects

Application Data Sets are designed to manage the complexity of migrating configuration data across multiple PeopleSoft systems. It is very common to have four or more databases in a PeopleSoft environment, including one or more for development, another for quality assurance, as well as the primary production system. PeopleTools migrates managed objects between environments in PeopleSoft projects that are extracted from one database and imported into another, which works well for PeopleTools metadata however it does not handle application configuration data.

ADS provides the ability for any authorized developer to easily define application data sets, create and modify projects and to compare and copy the objects in the projects similar to the way managed objects have been copied and compared for many years.

Application Data Sets:

• Enable developers to use PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture (PIA) to create data set definitions as a hierarchy of records with some collective properties. A data set definition defines the shape of data set instances. It consists of the following elements:

  • A root record. The primary keys of the root record are then keys of the data set instance

  • An optional hierarchy of related child records, where each child record includes the keys of its parent record.

  • An optional set of properties.

  • An optional set of relationships to other data sets, and their properties.

  • An optional set of attribute groups and their properties.

  • An optional application class having Peoplecode that transform and/or validates the data set instances at copy, compare and validate time.

  Data set definitions are like record definitions: record definitions define a group of fields that constitute a record; data set definitions define a group of records that constitute a data set. Both record definitions and data set definitions are metadata that define the shape of data.

• Data sets support relations and groups. Relations make it possible to associate two or more data sets based on keys, criteria and properties. Data Sets that include relationships with the family property make it possible to merge the attributes when the data set is copied to the target database. Groups can be used to define records and fields that can be safely merged or that should be hidden from compare.

• Enable developers or administrators using PIA to insert data set instances (data content) into projects to represent a unit of work as an ADS project. ADS projects are like managed object projects: a collection of data set instances having various data set definitions.

• Enable developers or administrators using PIA or Change Assistant to copy, compare, validate, and merge data sets that get included in an ADS project.

• Enable PIA-based copy and compare to use powerful servers rather than the Windows workstations required for PeopleSoft Integrated Development Environment (PSIDE)-based copy and compare.

• Integrate with the Enterprise Components Approval Framework to provide administrative control of the project copy from file process.

• In some cases, provide enhanced security to assure that the data set definitions are suitable for copying data, that the user has access to the PIA data set pages, and that user has the right to copy and compare the data.

• Provide an alternative to Data Mover that offers greater visibility and control for managed changes of a customer's environment.

• Allow pre-defined target configuration fields values to be preserved within each instance. The object owner defines what fields can be preserved using groups. The customer can review and choose to override default behavior with interactive PIA-based compare.

Data Migration Workbench is the interactive user interface used to:

• Define ADS project content.

• Launch copy, compare and validation operations for projects.

• View compare and validation results, and modify the copy options of data sets that will be copied.

Data Migration Workbench shows the current status of a project and prevents inconsistent actions. Once you have defined the ADS project, you can copy the data to a file that can later be compared or copied from file on another PeopleSoft database.

The Data Migration Workbench uses a Project Repository as a place in the file system where project files can be copied to and from. The Project Repository is defined in the data base as a repository name, an associated file path, and one or more areas (sub folders) that can contain project files. The purpose of Project Repository is to avoid manually copying project files from one system to another by promoting common definition of shared file locations and providing better security for administrative control of the places that project files can be copied to.

PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM) is used by PeopleSoft to deliver maintenance to customers. PUM uses ADS projects to migrate both Peopletools-owned objects like Pivot Grids and Activity Guides, and application-owned objects like Global Payroll. The principle change in 8.54 integration with PUM was to create a composite project of customer-selected units of work containing ADS projects and their dependents for ADS in a manner similar to what has been done for IDE objects in 8.53. Thus when a customer selects units of work to apply in PUM, and the dependency calculation adds dependent units of work, a single composite ADS project is generated. This simplifies downstream processing.