General Resource Loader (GRLoader) › Data Translation

Data Translation

Data values provided by an MDR may not meet the requirements of CA CMDB because of the following reasons:

• The country or language for an MDR can differ from the country or language selected for CA CMDB server installation. For example: A CA Cohesion MDR that uses American English transfers data to a CMDB in France. When CA Cohesion creates server CIs, it specifies the CI family as "Server". However, in France the CI family must be specified as "Serveur". An inbound "Server" value must be translated to the required "Serveur" value whenever the American-based MDR communicates with the French CA CMDB installation.
• Data inconsistencies can occur in lookup (SREL) fields. For example: An MDR contains CIs with a manufacturer of "Dell Inc", "Dell Corporation", or simply "Dell". If the CA CMDB manufacturer table requires "Dell Inc", other values are rejected with warning messages. The invalid inbound "Dell Corporation" and "Dell" values must be translated to the standard "Dell Inc" value for the manufacturer attribute.
• Data inconsistencies in non-SREL fields. For example, some MDRs report data in units, while others report data in bytes or gigabytes. You can standardize the format of the data stored in the CMDB.

To satisfy these requirements, GRLoader can translate any incoming value to another value, by using an XML-based lookup file when GRLoader is run.

Important: The pre-edit translation and validation step occurs when CI and relationship XML is read, before normal GRLoader processing occurs (for example, update_if_null, lookup, dateformat) and before data is transmitted to the CA CMDB server.

Because each MDR can have specific translation requirements, the data translation file is specified for each GRLoader invocation. For standardization purposes, we recommend that this file is located on a common file system and shared among the CA CMDB data providers.