Validate Information In The Staging Tables
During the first validation step, the system validates the data you loaded into the staging tables. This section provides some high level discussion about the validation process.
A Batch Process Per Maintenance Object
Each of the maintenance objects that are eligible for conversion must be validated using its respective entity validation conversion batch process. These are classic background processes that can also be run against production data.
These processes are multi-threaded and have no dependency on other processes.
Validation Mode
By default, each entity is fully validated for schema as well as entity validation rules, at the maintenance object and business object level. The batch process performs the same business rules that are used to validate data added by users in your production system. You may restrict the batch process to perform schema validation only or entity validation rules only using a batch parameter. This may be useful in identifying common data issues in preliminary runs.
Random Sample Mode
By default all records are selected for validation. The "Process Every Nth" batch parameter allows you execute this process in a random-sample mode to highlight pervasive errors. In this mode, you are actually telling the batch process to validate every N records.
We strongly recommend validating each entity in the following steps:
- Execute the validation batch process in random-sample mode.
- Review and correct the errors. Note, you can use the base package's transactions to correct an error if the error isn't so egregious that it prevents the object from being displayed on the browser.
- After all pervasive errors have been corrected; re-execute each object's validation batch process in all-instances mode to highlight elusive, one-off errors.
Reported Errors
Errors encountered during validation are logged onto the conversion Validation Error (CI_VAL_ERR) table. Note that at the start of this job, all rows in the conversion error table for the process maintenance object are deleted.
You can view errors highlighted by the validation process using the Conversion Entity Dashboard portal.
Recommendations To Speed Up Validation
The following points describe ways to accelerate the execution of the validation process:
- Ensure that statistics are recalculated after data has been inserted into the staging tables.
- Execute the process multi threaded.
- Execute shorter running validation processes (e.g., less records) first so that the error data can be analyzed while other processes are busy running.
- Remember that validation can be run in random-sample mode. We recommend running these batch processes using a large sample value for this parameter until the pervasive problems have been rectified.
Another use for these programs
In addition to validating your objects after conversion or an upgrade, the validation programs have another use. Say for example, you want to experiment with changing the validation of a business entity and you want to determine the impact of this new validation on your existing records. You could change the validation and then run that entity’s validation batch process- it will produce errors for each record that fails the new validation.