DataFlux Data Management Studio 2.6: User Guide

Exporting and Importing Business Rules

Overview

There are two interfaces for exporting and importing business rules: 

• The Business Rule Manager. Use this method if you want to import and export selected business rule components, such as business rule tasks and fields.
• The Export/Import package wizards. Use this method if you want to export and import business rules as a whole.

Import and Export from the Business Rule Manager

The Business Rule Manager enables you to import and export business rules, tasks, and related objects. You can access these features by selecting File > Export and File > Import in the Business Rule Manager. Use this method if you want to import and export selected business rule components, such as business rule tasks and fields.

There are some special considerations when you import thresholds and dimensions, two objects in the Business Rule Manager.

The rule import process will try to find the source threshold in the target repository (by looking for one with the same name) and use that threshold. If a threshold is not found with the same name, and then the default will be used.

Note that you cannot import business rules from a file if the business rule code in that file contains non-ASCII characters. For example, these characters can be present in business rule code that has been copied into a word processor and then pasted into a file. In this situation, the control characters from the word processor can appear as non-ASCII characters in the file. These non-ASCII characters will cause the business rule import to fail.

No dimensions are imported during the dashboard import process, but the process does look for any of the source dimensions in the target repository (again by name). It will set the weight and threshold (searches by name) for those target dimensions as they were assigned in the source.

Note: A field in a business rule is identified by name only. If you import a business rule field that has the same name as a business rule field in the current repository, the field in the current repository will be overwritten.

Import and Export Business Rules in a SAS Package

In addition to the import and export features in the Business Rules Manager, you can use the standard Export/Import package wizards which are described in Exporting and Importing Packages. Use this method if you want to export and import business rules as a whole.

If you want to export a set of business rules that reference a set of tasks, export the rules in one package and export the tasks in a separate package. To import, import the rules package first, and then import the task package. This ensures that the relationships between rules and tasks are preserved.

The standard Export/Import package wizards ignore dashboards, with one exception: dimensions that are associated with tasks are connected to existing dashboards in the target repository.