Product Adoption Tip of the Month: Get That Data into Prophix
Import data is a very commonly used process in Prophix which is why it is a good idea to have a deeper understanding of the import data process.
Importing Your Data
In the Import Data process, we have 4 tabs that we must go through before we can go ahead and run our process: General, Source, Import Options and Target Mapping.
General
The Genera l tab is used to define the import type (importing data or importing dimensions) as well as the cube that you are importing to.
Source
Once you have selected your import type as well as your cube, you can move on to the Source tab. In this tab, you will need to select where your source data is coming from. You have 2 options when it comes to importing your data, you may either import your data through a file or a data connector.
If you are importing your data using a file, you will see an additional option to use your first row in the file as a header file. This means the first row is treated as the dimension titles and not values.
Import Options
Once we have selected the file we are going to import, we can move on to our Importing Options. Here we can control exactly how our data is going to be imported into Prophix.
The first option we will see is the write option . Here you can select the “Add to existing” option if you wish to have new data added to the existing data, or you can select “Remove only target data” if you would like to replace the data that is being affected by the import process.
Keep in mind that there is no option to overwrite the data that is being affected. If you would like to add new data but you know that you are replacing data that is already in the system, you would need to remove the data by creating a Remove Data process before this import is run to avoid duplicating your data.
The second thing you will need to change is your time format. You will see two options for time format which are time across and time down, this refers to how time is organized in your import file. Time across would be used if your time periods run horizontally (if your time members are in columns) whereas time down would be used if your time periods run vertically (if your time members are in rows).
We also must define the time range in which we are importing. Keep in mind that you will not be allowed to import data outside of these time ranges. In the screenshot above, we are importing data starting in 2022M01 and ending in 2022M12, if we were to try and import data for 2021, those records would be rejected.
Lastly, we have the option to reverse debit accounts, reverse credit accounts or leave them unchanged. This option allows you to flip the sign for either debit or credit accounts if you need to.
Target Mapping
Finally, we can move on to the Target Mapping tab. Here we can map the dimensions (our targets) to the corresponding columns from our source. There may be cases where you only have one specific source that you are trying to import to. For example, what if you wanted to import to your actual version. If that is the case, you can simply click the drop-down under the dimension you would like to import into and select “Specific Member”.
You can now click on the member selector and choose which dimension member you would like to import to. In the example given above, we would select our actual version.
Let us know us know if this helped you gain a deeper understanding of the Import Data feature in Prophix.
