In the 6xxx release when you synchronize your Prepare instance with an Ingest instance there are two things that may happen:
- TimeXtender automatically handles changes, no input is required.
- TimeXtender cannot automatically deal with the changes and user input is required to tell TimeXtender how mappings should be set up.
In both cases, there are significant improvements to be made (or deficiencies handled). I will list my issues and suggestions for each in the following sections:
Changes can be handled automatically
It is usually great that TimeXtender handles things for you, but there is currently no way of seeing the changes that were applied. In the 20.10.x BU setup, a source synch would show you what changes were applied. In my opinion what should be available is the following:
- a synchronize which can be auto-resolved should show the proposed (additions, removals, mutations) changes. It only applies them if the user agrees
- it should be possible to review the current mapping state in its totality
- the interface showing all mappings should be sortable
Changes cannot be handled automatically
When TimeXtender cannot handle changes, it shows a dialogue with all mappings (one line per table, followed by all field mappings). You need to scroll through a potentially huge list of mappings to find any that are problematic. This dialogue will not accept empty (None) mappings and give you a warning. What we need here is the following:
- the interface showing all mappings should be sortable (to quickly sort on tables with errors)
- it should be possible to collapse and expand tables (start with everything collapsed) so that fields can be hidden for a shorter list
- it should be possible to select None as a mapping. If a field is removed from source, there is no reason why None is not a valid mapping to DWH. It is fine to mark the field visually, but if I want a field without a mapping that is not always an error
- it should be possible to filter the interface so I can focus on the problems only instead of needing to scroll through thousands of mappings with pgdn to try and find one problematic mapping
- it should be possible to review the current mapping state in its totality
I am not sure how mapping sets are currently visualised (if they are at all), but those rules should be reachable from the general mapping interface.
