Transferring SQLServer data to MetaTagger

Hi David,

Is the data from the SQL Server being used as a "vocabulary"? or are you trying to use it to populate select lists within the metadata capture form? or something else?

If the data is to be turned into a vocabulary - and you're putting it into XML format - look at the Vocab DTD in the Appendix of the MetaTagger manual. Figure out how you want to map the data from your existing server into the structure of the vocabulary (e.g., do you have a sense of parent/child relationships between terms, do you want to include descriptions of the terms in the vocabulary, etc.) and then create the process for doing that (I'm partial to Perl, but it doesn't really matter what you use as long as you can pull in the data from the SQL Server and spit out the correctly formatted XML file).

One thing to be particulary careful about ... assuming that this is a "vocabulary" ... is make sure you can get reliable, consistant, unique id's from the SQL Server - otherwise you're going to have lots of problems building parent/child relationships and dealing with issues if/when some of the data changes.

Once you have the XML - use iwloadvocab to load it into MetaTagger (take a look at iwcleanvocab too - a very useful tool)

If I've completely missed the mark as to what you are trying to do - please follow-up with clarifications - perhaps a sample situation of the kinds of data you are talking about and how you want to use it.

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)

we plan to extract data from a Oracle Database to populate drop down fields on the metadata capture form. What would be the best way to do this??

If the drop-down list values are independent of any other field of data, you can probably do this with an inline.

If the drop-down list values are dependent on some other field's data, you would need to use a cgi-callout, but I think there might be difficulties in doing so in the current version (I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that it is difficult to ascertain the value any field other than the one associated with the callout at the present time).

We have a fluid structure when it comes to our product distribution channel. Many distributors change zones regularly -- How does one go about making sure that once a distributor moves from say, ZoneA to ZoneB , the metadata associated with all ZoneB distributors gets transferred to the distributor??

I'm not sure what you're asking here so I'll make a general suggestion: Start a new thread in this forum specifically for this question, and do so with a post that provides a better sense of what you are doing and how/where the issues of metadata come into play.

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)