Where can I get my hands on the PSO Batch Importer?
You must speak with your sales representative to receive this tool. If you don’t have his/her name, submit a ticket with TS and we’ll put you in touch with the right person.
It should be noted that Rhythmyx lacks the following features that I consider to be important for batch importing:
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[li]No superuser account. You have to set up the batch importer to log in using someone’s account, and in some community. But as there is no concept of superusers, it will be restricted to the same operations an ordinary user can do, so you either have to redesign your workflows, or program the importer to send items through a series of states (and then remember not to modify your workflows in the future.)
[/li][li]No rollback/transactions. If the import fails in any way (e.g. due to validation) you cannot back out of the entire operation and leave the repository in exactly the state it was in before you started. This is more of a problem if attempting to modify existing items, although certain tasks (e.g. adding “complex” child fields) require new items be saved first.
[/li][li]No concept of long-term ownership of items. When importing data, you usually want it to go straight to a public state, so it will be published to a web site straight away. But if you develop the batch importer to do this, it cannot set up any control over the items created in the Rhythmyx repository that is finer-grained than the community level, because items cannot be checked-out while in a public state. So, for example, if you are thinking of batch importing staff records, so that each person has a contact page on a web site, which they can then edit via Rhythmyx, you need to be able to trust every member of staff will stick to their own content item, and not make “amusing” edits to their colleagues items.
[/li][li]No temporary lock-out of server, to prevent users from editing content items while the batch importer is running. Nor can you send out a system-wide message, to tell people to log off by a certain time and date.
[/li][li]No way to verify the content type is unchanged since you developed your batch importer code. If there was a last modified date on content types that you could query, you could abandon importing/updating data into items of that type at the start. As it is, you have to attempt to create/modify an item and see if it fails.
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We had one of the UK partner companies (Odin) develop a bulk importer for us, such was the complexity.
Is it possible to ingest external data (like a csv or text file) into Rhythmyx and create content items?
I’ve made a CSV importer that I’ve used for several clients. If you want to use it, please let me know.