Importing content from a database to TeamSite

Is there a 'best practice' in importing existing content from a relational database into TeamSite?

We've recently decided to use TeamSite as our content management tool and would like to simplify the effort of loading our existing content from a relational database.

This import needs to happen only once during our initial setup of TeamSite. We are currently considering writing an application that extracts this data from the database and creates documents. We could then load those documents into TeamSite. Is this the most efficient method of doing this?

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

MattP

The whole content conversion process is always interesting. When you end up managing this content in TS, do you plan on outputting "flat files", or populating a database with datadeploy?

Either way, the steps involved will be getting the content out of the DB and into XML files that match a DTD of your desired data capture template. Those xml files, once in TS, need to have the extended attributes assigned to them (see TS manuals). Then content authors can manage the content via templates that either populate your database or generate flat files that are deployed to a web server.

As with anything else, there are many ways to achieve the same goal. I suppose you could also create datacapture templates with callouts to the db.

Good luck, hope this helps...
Matt

Matthew Petitjean
BOC Group
Murray Hill, NJ 07974 USA

gzevin

just to add my 2c..

from what you said, it's not that clear whether you are abandoning the DB altogether or you still intend to use it, synchronised with DCRs? This will determine the most appropriate architectural decision.

Greg Zevin
Independent Interwoven Consultant/Architect
Sydney, AU

Migrateduser

If it's a one-off DB dump to TeamSite you have somel options.

1. You can use Datadeploy to dump from source DB to Datadeploy XML tuples. If you need any pre-processing, this can be done using Datadeploy Java tuple pre-processor where you can flatten data or capture lookup/reference data along the way.
Once you have your XML output, you can then transform into DCR format using XSLT or Java or Perl XML parser, whatever you are most comfortable with.

2. Alternatively you could achieve same direct from DB to DCRs with Java or Perl DB driver and XML parser, or your language of choice.You may however find Datadeploy and XSLT less work.

Whatever your method to produce DCRs, you will need to set TeamSite extended attributes using iwextattr command line tool or TeamSites OpenAPI.

-Peter
Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant

mattgreving

Gregg, thanks for the reply. In the long run we do not intend to keep any of the content in the relational database. But for our initial conversion to TeamSite we need to keep a copy of some of the content in our database in order to support other applications. Until we change the other applications that use this data we will not be able to eliminate the use of the database.

Thanks again for your help,
Matt

mattgreving

Peter, thanks for the very informative reply. I would definitely prefer to use DataDeploy to migrate the data to TeamSite. I was not aware of the ability of DataDeploy to export from the source DB to XML tuples. The tuple pre-processor is also a great feature that we would definitely need to utilize. I will check the DataDeploy documentation for the functionality that you described.

Thanks!
Matt