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Modding the Metaload process

hroderick-thr
11 - Bolide

The ink is drying on our Connect contract and we intend to upgrade version at least twice per year. The more I learn about feeding our data into metaloaders, the more I understand the need to modify the metaloaders to produce the best catalog possible. I seek your advice and learning on the best way to modify to minimize risk and effort of moving modifications to new versions.

 

My past experience with other applications suggests that, instead of changing the metaloaders, that I modify the staging database content after the metaloaders load the staging database. Are there reasons one way is better than the other?

 

Has anyone had experience merging metaloader xml changes and can recommend tools for doing that?

 

Any advice or experience sharing would be appreciated.

2 REPLIES 2
OndrejC
Alteryx
Alteryx

Hi @hroderick-thr ,

from the product perspective I would like to understand what are you modifications to our metadata loaders. Maybe we can incorporate these into our standard set of loaders or suggest a way how to do it in more efficient way.

 

Ondrej

Connect Team

hroderick-thr
11 - Bolide

Thanks for the interest @OndrejC  (and also thanks for losing sleep to help is iron out a wrinkle today)

 

We have a couple of specific adjustments to the base loaders we now know we need to fix. 

1. Some Tableau assets we need to exclude based on wording in their top project description

2. We use many Teradata views and all are missing data type and length.

 

We know there are many unknown and future adjustments we will want or need to fix beyond what we now know. We know that our changes will often need to be ported and retested into new versions. We want to develop these two known in a manner that allows for much more growth and makes a minimal impact on the metaloader workflow.

 

After many warnings from the Alteryx side of the team we have decided to not make changes to the staging database tables directly after the metaloader has filled them. Instead we will add macro workflows after inputs and before outputs of the metaloader workflow. It will be some change with every version but most often the same re-insertion of a few macros.

 

I would like to suggest that the product development team support customer customization by placing macros in the metaloaders after input and before output that do nothing except pass data in and out with the intent that customers build these out as they need. 

 

We appreciate the great potential you guys have built into Connect and are doing all we can to do deliver great uses of it.