The Business Case:
You have just gotten your FDMEE data loads set up and
running, including DataMaps that are dynamic based on the hierarchies (i.e. if
the level 0 member value is a descendant of a given parent map it, otherwise
IGNORE). You discover the handy “Refresh
Members” button on an FDMEE target application:
…but, as the administrator, you don’t want to have to log
into the system and click that button once a day, every other day, or every
hour.
The Problem:
Oracle doesn’t give you an any way to schedule this “Refresh
Members” function, because why would you ever want to automate that? Right?! …Sigh…
A Solution:
…and here comes the FDMEE REST API to the rescue!!
Now, I had been mulling over this particular question for
nearly a year, and finally came back to it in the last couple of weeks after I ran
across this Refresh
Members thread in the Oracle community where John Goodwin put an example
REST post for refreshing the members. If
you want a lot of great information regarding REST and PBCS, John has several
great blog posts on the subject…
So, armed with this new information, I set out to find a way
to write the jython script to submit the REST request. After digging around some python
documentation, I did the right kind of search and came across one of Francisco’s
REST API posts. As always, he provided
some great codes snippets to pretty much write the entire script (Using
On-Prem Planning REST API to Import Metadata). Of course, we aren’t using Planning, but we
get a very good idea of how the script needs to go…
I’ll just pause here to say a huge “THANK YOU!” to these
guys. They have helped me so much with
their insight and knowledge!
A lot of the following will be very close to Francisco’s
post, with a couple of changes.
Steps to run the “REFRESH MEMBERS” Job
1.
Import modules:
Note the first import for DwgObject, which is another gift
from Franciso. In one of his other blogs
he talked about how to decode passwords from the ODI repository, so I have
created a dummy data server in ODI to house my credentials to use for the
authentication step, rather than a hardcoded UID and password.
2.
Establish variables and build the REST URL:
3.
Set up the “Payload” or “Data” for the request:
This is where I had some fun trying to figure out what was
going on. All the information seemed to
indicate that the “urllib.urlencode()” was required. However, I continued to receive a HTTP Error
400 – Incorrect Syntax error until I just passed the raw payload string. Once I
commented out the urlencode line, voalà!
Job submitted successfully!
4.
Set the Authentication. Again, I use the method of decoding
credentials from ODI for this.
5.
Open the Request, add the Headers, and add the
payload
There are a couple of methods for adding the payload/data and therefore
causing the request to be a POST request.
The following seemed nice and clean:
The debug log entries for the request objects were very helpful in
diagnosing my issues with getting the script to work properly. The response may be parsed for different
information like ProcessID and Status of the request. Based on the status, the sky is the limit on
where to go next. You could even make
this into a custom function to call from the BefImport event.
Hooray! A working “REFRESH MEMBERS”
jython script utilizing the REST API for FDMEE!
Hope this is helpful to you and good luck!
