Preparing source system data

For each separate functional area of Infor EPM that you intend to import, you must extract and transform your source system data into staging tables.

The column specifications and data requirements are described in this section. The integration stored procedures include placeholders where you can insert your custom scripts that perform the extraction from a source system. Custom scripts can also be run independently after the staging tables have been populated.

Some data areas are more complicated than others and use staging tables that are validated and transformed by the stored procedures. The staging tables are then copied into the set of dimension or cube data tables that Designer can import.

Other data areas are lists of dimension elements, so the integration scripts provide only the set of dimension or cube data tables that Designer can import from directly. The dimension tables have these suffixes:

_ELEMENTS
_PARENTS
_HIERARCHIES
_ATTRIBUTES

Often only the _ELEMENTS and _PARENTS tables are needed. Since no initial validation occurs for these tables, you must provide data exactly as it is defined in Designer, OLAP, and Infor EPM. For example, columns that specify other elements of Infor EPM dimensions must be valid existing element names without leading or trailing blank spaces.