By Steve Turner

The Maximo Enterprise Adapter is part of the Tivoli Software Group. It enables quick connection/sharing with enterprise systems and a complete integration environment. The IBM Tivoli Maximo Enterprise Adapter (MEA) has the capability to import data from both XML and flat file formats.  Of the two processes configuring Maximo to import flat files is a little more complex.

When importing flat files with the IBM Maximo Enterprise AdapterThe first thing to note is that when a flat file is imported although the source data is usually one file with a number of data rows, as the file is added to the JMS queue the file is broken down in to individual messages.  For example a file of 500 records will place 500 messages on the JMS queue.

The data parser is also case-sensitive to the column titles.  These must be entirely in uppercase.  If they are not the parser will recognise that the column is present in the file but will not import the data in the column.

Another important point is the use of the User Exit customisation.  This class when created can contain three methods, the pre-processor, the post-processor and the mbo processor.  As a record is imported the class is instantiated once for each method, it is not possible to pass data from one method to another.  Finally the configuration of the integration object may have to be different from that created for an XML import. 

The XML importer manages some activities implicitly which have to be managed explicitly when the same data is imported as a flat file.