Configuring Custom Objects for Migration

During the implementation and extension of the product, new custom administrative maintenance objects may be introduced. If your implementation would like to migrate records in those maintenance objects using the Content Migration Assistant, additional steps must be performed, which are highlighted in the following sections.

Physical Business Object

As described in Understanding the BO Filtering Process, the migration plan requires a business object for its instruction. The business object is used to identify the records eligible for inclusion in the migration. Assuming your custom tables use one or more "logical" business objects for their processing, your implementation must decide if these business objects are appropriate for use by the migration plans, or if a physical BO is warranted. If so, create an appropriate physical BO.

Review MO Option Configuration

The following points highlight maintenance object (MO) configuration that should be reviewed or updated to support CMA:

  • If a physical BO was created (above), link it to the MO as an option using the appropriate option type.

  • Be sure that your MO defines an appropriate FK Reference and includes an Option on the MO that identifies the FK Reference. This is used by various portals and zones for CMA when showing detail about records being imported into the target region. Also be sure that this FK reference defines an Information program.

  • As described in Identifying Tables to Exclude From Migrations, an MO option is used to identify child tables for an MO that should never be included in a migration. If your custom maintenance object includes a standard Log table, than the recommendation is to list that table as an excluded table. Depending on the specific design of the maintenance object, there may be other child tables to define.

Characteristic Type Configuration

The CMA import process will attempt to create a log record for any administrative object that includes a log table. If your implementation has introduced any custom administrative tables that you plan to include in a migration request and it includes a log table, you must, to ensure that the log creation is successful, add your log table as a valid characteristic entity to the characteristic type F1-MGO (Migration Object).

Navigate to Characteristic Type and select the characteristic type F1-MGO. Navigate to the Characteristic Entity tab and add a row to include the characteristic entity for your custom maintenance object's log table.

Standard CMA Configuration

Create one or more migration plans for the new object, depending on the type of data in the maintenance object and the types of migrations you envision:

  • If you have implemented only one "logical" business object used to define the data in the MO, then a single migration plan that references the this BO (or the maybe the MO's physical BO) is appropriate.

  • If you have implemented more than one "logical" business object, would the data for multiple business objects get copied together? Then perhaps a single migration plan that references the MO's physical BO is appropriate.

  • Are there additional foreign keys defined using mapXML in the business object(s) for the MO? If so, then it is recommended to include sub-instructions to define the links. At this point, if multiple "logical" BOs exist, your implementation may choose to define all the additional elements in the same migration plan or choose to define separate migration plans for each logical BO.

  • Your implementation may decide to define more than one migration plan for the same type of record based on the types of migrations you plan to include. For example, you may decide to include a migration plan that copies only the records in this maintenance object. You may decide to define another migration plan that copies the records in this MO along with related records in another MO (for a special type of migration). Having said that, be sure to design the migration plan with reuse in mind to minimize maintenance efforts.

In order to support Entity List migration request, a default migration plan must be defined as an option on the maintenance object. This should be a single migration plan that supports all types of business objects for the MO.

If your implementation has a template migration request to use for migrations, include the new migration plan(s) as appropriate.

CAUTION: Important! New migration plans and migration requests should follow naming conventions. Refer to System Data Naming Convention for more information.