Correspondence

The term “correspondence” in Infor Public Sector refers to a set of related processes that export and import data based on keywords that represent specific pieces of information in the database.

Data is exported as XML, and can be imported from a variety of different formats.

The export processes rely on templates that map keywords to XML elements in the output file. For bill output, for example, you would have keywords for the account number, the bill date, the line items, and so on. The export template maps these keywords to XML elements such as <AccountNumber> and <BillingDate>. For each bill in a bill run, the correspondence engine will populate these XML elements in the output file with the values in the database tables and columns that the keywords stand for.

Conversely, import templates map data elements in the input file to keywords so that the imported data can be placed in the correct tables and columns in the Infor Public Sector database.

The term “correspondence” is used because these tools were first designed to generate automated customer correspondence such as delinquency and NSF notices. The keyword model has since been extended to a variety of other export and import processes.