Oracle DRM Blog

One of the little known secret in the Oracle DRM 9.3.2 and after, as I have outlined in one of the previous post, is the migration utility. Sure you can understand from the name what this utility does, but today I am going to cover something it’s also good for – documenting what you did inside of DRM, especially with those several hundred properties that you’ve created.

After you bought Oracle Hyperion DRM, and used it to consolidate several of your silo hierarchies from a number of systems, you’re likely to have the need to start documenting them. One reason is for ease of administration. If you’re like me, created a lot of Properties inside of DRM for the purpose of storing information, and generating the necessary output, then these are good candidates for documentation for now and the future.

One of the biggest pet peeve I have before version 9.3.2, is that if I have these masses of Properties, I’d have no choice but to do cut and paste from the DRM Client into an Excel spreadsheet or Word. Besides the pain of going back and forth doing copy-n-paste with this method, you’re also likely to make mistakes. Of course, the biggest factor is that it’ll take alot of hours.

With the Oracle DRM Migration Utility, you can cut that time down to minutes. Let us begin and show you how it’s done.

1. Go to your Oracle DRM Migration Utility tool (http://localhost/mdm_migration). Select the Extract option. Enter the login information in the next screen.

2. In the next scree, select the Property Definitions. Click the Next button. Click Run Extract.

3.  Once it’s generated, select the download option and the Property Definitions will be saved as an XML file.

4. You can test this file using Internet Explorer by opening this file from inside your hard drive. You should see a bunch of XML tags with information inside like the screen below. Obviously this is not the best way to view the information. And so we’re going to open Excel and bring these data into it.

5.  In Excel 2003 or later, you can open a XML file very easily. It’d be just like opening any other files. Now, in the second dialog, be sure to open the file “As an XML List“.

6. Click OK to the next dialog.

7.And there you have it, automatic generation of your property definitions. It’ll save you hours of work, and you won’t miss a space or a comma (or more than that), in your documentation. What’s more you can use this to enrich the information to provide greater value of how these properties can be used in your Master Data Management.