Operation

The Net Change operation extends the functionality of TCC by allowing the customer to reduce the amount of transactions that are required to synchronize his system with the Taleo Enterprise application.

Purpose

The Net Change operation increases the update process efficiency when it's impossible to send only the required changes to a Taleo application, and the only alternative is to send all the data for a certain type of entity.

Net Change checks the data being sent, and removes all unchanged data from the transmission. This improves the integration process by limiting the amount of data applied to the database and making it easier to respect the volume limits.

Process

Net Change uses a flat file proprietary database system to store the data that is equivalent to the target application (e.g. Taleo Recruiting). The Net Change tables are created on an Entity by Entity basis on first time use whether it be Net Change Setup or ongoing run. This information is used to synchronize customer system and target application.

The customer's data must be provided in a standard TCC CSV file. The structure of this file must be created with the TCC Import Wizard. The customer selects the entity on which to apply the Net Change process and builds the CSV file structure by selecting the entity fields available in the entity data model. Standard Net Change templates are available.

The Net Change work-flow is defined in a standard TCC configuration file.

To start a Net Change process, the TCC execution mode (GUI or Command Line) must be invoked. The customer data CSV file is retrieved and processed by Net Change. At this point, the customer data is compared to the Net Change database and transactions are generated for all the differences that are detected. The output of this computation is a T-XML file containing all the transactions required to update the target application. The T-XML file is then wrapped in a SOAP envelope and is sent to the target application.

TCC polls the target application for an import request completion, and retrieves the result document when it's ready. The result processor output is a SOAP wrapped T-XML file that contains Net Change transaction status and attributes for each entity processed. The T-XML output file is converted to a standard TCC CSV response document.

The Net Change Result Processor validates the answer for each transaction, and those successfully processed by the target application are committed to the Net Change database. Transactions reported in error are not committed and will be reprocessed on the next Net Change run. The entities are now synchronized in application and customer databases.

Primary-Secondary Concept

When synchronizing customer and target application data with Net Change, the Primary-Secondary concept must always be respected. The customer data is the Primary and the modified data replicated to the target is the Secondary. Modifications must always be done in the Primary (CSV file). The modified data replicated to the target (Secondary) with Net Change should not be modified in any way.

Certain business cases require that only some of the data be managed by Net Change in a Primary-Secondary relation, while the target application manages other data known only to itself. Candidate entities give us a good example. There are two types of candidates, external and internal. Internal candidates are managed by the customer system (Primary) and the external candidates by the Taleo Enterprise system (Secondary). Only the internal candidates need to be synchronized with the target application.