Oracle DRM Blog

Having been writing for a little while and that’s because handling a new born takes up alot of time but hopefully in the near future this blog can be expanded to cover more diverse topics. We’ll see. Got an interesting email from S.Varshne below and we’re going to try to answer it. I do take our reader’s comments very seriously and a large percent of them gets replied. Oracle DRM continues to be one of the best Data Governance tool for Financial MDM out there in my opinion and no doubt tracking changes is important to the piece of the puzzle. There’re two different ways of tracking changes.

• 1. the native DRM log – this provides very detail for every action for every node
• 2. the less detailed DRM properties tracking the date/time of the most recent changes.

Let’s review the questions…

I tried what you suggested here in baby steps
- First enabled TrackChanges System preference
- Created a property called NodeChangedFlag (You mention in your article that I can pick and choose the preferences I want to use. So I leave out the rest)
- Updated the System preference NodeChangedProperty to point to NodeChangedFlag

Here are the error messages I see…

********************
Event Type: Error
Source: MDM NTier Engine
Date/Time: 10/12/2009 5:54:48 PM
Exception Emdm_Exception with message ‘Track Changes Disabled due to configuration issues (See previous log items for details)’

Event Type: Error
Source: MDM NTier Engine
Date/Time: 10/12/2009 5:54:48 PM
Exception Emdm_Exception with message ‘Invalid ChangedByProperty property in system preferences. Contact system administrator.’

Event Type: Error
Source: MDM NTier Engine
Date/Time: 10/12/2009 5:54:48 PM
Exception Emdm_Exception with message ‘Invalid ChangedOnProperty property in system preferences. Contact system administrator.’

Event Type: Error
Source: MDM NTier Engine
Date/Time: 10/12/2009 5:54:48 PM
Exception Emdm_Exception with message ‘Invalid AddedOnProperty property in system preferences. Contact system administrator.’

Event Type: Error
Source: MDM NTier Engine
Date/Time: 10/12/2009 5:54:48 PM
Exception Emdm_Exception with message ‘Invalid AddedByProperty property in system preferences. Contact system administrator.’

*********************

So after I tried setting all of the above properties/ system preferences, I am able to change all except one preference (ChangedOnProperty) without any issue. It looked like the system preference was expecting a boolean user property instead of a string. So I changed the user property UpdatedOnDate to boolean (even though it doesnt make sense) and I was able to point the sys preference (ChangedOnProperty) to UpdatedOnDate.

After this setting, the DRM Engine refused to restart. I did not capture the error but the logical assumption was incorredt the system preference (ChangedOnProperty) setting.

My question is that
1. why would DRM not allow ChangeTracking for a select range of system preferences, or did I do something wrong
2. Is there a known issue with the system preference ChangedOnProperty or again did I do something wrong.

I guess I really would want an solution to my problem, where I am trying to highlight the Nodes that were changed in DRM after a certain date & time in some way (Change in Font style, glyphs, etc)

BTW, to get the system up and running, I had to update the DRM database table and empty out the values.

There are a few things to note:

• You need to make sure you setup the properties correctly. My preference is to use ‘String’ and ‘Global’.
• On the property set for ChangedOnProperty, it should be set as ‘String’ also even though Date may seemed more logical.
• Prior to version 9.3.2, an invalid change of property causes the console to refuse to start. This is a known issue if you go thru the “Read Me” of the installation. So make sure you upgrade to version 9.3.2 or later.