Interface Configuration File

Data from all pre-defined planning interfaces to external systems such as RMFCS (Oracle Retail Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service) or internal systems like Retail Insight/Science is pulled through importers from RAP Data Exchange (RDX) schema. Any data that is going from Planning to external systems can also be exported through importers from the RDX schema. Though interface tables in the RDX schema will not change quite often, as defined by the interface contracts between respective applications, the planning/forecast application that is implemented on PDS supports extensibility and enterprise edition (EE) configuration. Therefore, importers and exporters must be configurable, since dimensions and fact names can be different for different customers. To provide for the configurability of importers and exports, the interface.cfg file (interface configuration file) is used. It is a free-form text file similar to the batch control file, and contains the mapping of dimension/facts in PDS to columns mapped to external tables for each interface.

Both importers and exporters are commonly referred as interfaces within PDS; each interface has a unique interface ID. Interfaces are classified as one of three types: dimension importers, data importers, or data exporters. Customer can create or modify entries only for the available list of interfaces. They can configure the interface to match and pull the required dimension/fact data per the dimension/fact names configured with in their application when those interfaces are executed in batch. For general availability applications, the pre-configured interface.cfg file is readily available, and customer can customize the file for any required extensibility changes, similar to an EE customer.

For more information about uploading the custom interface.cfg file, see the Load Interface Mappings task in the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Cloud Edition Administration Guide.