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Dan's Dev Corner - January 2018
Velocity Auto-Loader
This is a new feature of Velocity that is intended to greatly simplify the process of loading other vendor’s sites, rooms, etc… into some other system. In this description, we’ll use the example of loading Documentum’s eRooms into HighQ sites.
The Velocity apps are basically designed to support a very large volume migration from one source system to one target system. Usually, several steps are created within a single job, so the user interaction to set up and monitor the migration are reasonable. The particular use-case this addresses is somewhat different, where a single customer might have hundreds or thousands of individual rooms to load. To manually set up separate jobs and/or steps would be impractical.
Bots
To streamline the process of handling individual rooms we’ve added a configurable and automated way to setup and start Velocity steps. Once initially set up, the customer/partner simply copies a room export into a hot directory and it automatically makes its way into HighQ as its own site.
What the process creator does:
- Run the SeeUnity eRoom extractor to pull documents, folders, and databases from an eRoom and put it into the SeeUnity Intermediate Format (SIF file).
- Set up a Velocity job giving the HighQ instance name and credentials.
- Set up a step within the job specifying all aspects including transforms, threading, and so on. Test the step with a sample SIF file and target site and make sure it works.
- Set up a Velocity Bot definition file. This file specifies a sequence of actions to take to get a source input file into Velocity.
- Set up a HighQ site definition file to provide additional details about the site.
Once this has been set up, a user can drop a file into a source directory and the following will happen automatically for each file representing a single room:
- The new source file is detected and the Bot is started.
- A format converter is launched for the specific format and the source file is converted to an output directory in the SeeUnity Intermediate Format (SIF).
- A HighQ site is created based on the input name using a site definition file.
- The Velocity template step is duplicated with the name that is a derivative of the input name.
- The source for the new step is updated for the location of the SIF directory that will be the source for the SIF crawler.
- The target site for the new step is updated to the newly created site.
- The step is started.
- The source file in the input directory is deleted.
The exact sequence of the Bot, specific names, and so on, are actually all determined by the Bot definition file. Additional actions can be added, the order can be changed, etc…
Since each source room creates its own step, it’s very easy for the customer to use Studio to make sure the import was successful (Audit/Queues).
This initial use of a Velocity Bot as described here is to streamline the process of loading an eRoom into HighQ. However, the more general idea of them is to automate redundant operator actions where it makes sense to make the migration process as simple as possible.