Population Mapping Files
The XML mapping files have the same purpose as for push operations, except that the direction is reversed. These mapping files describe how the data returned by the connector will be mapped to the UCMDB data.
The information provided here is relevant for population mapping and is not already mentioned for the Enhanced Generic Push Adapter.
Following is an example of a mapping for UCMDB Nodes and Running Software. The first image shows the Nodes and Software Population TQL query. The second image displays the Nodes and Software Population Mapping.
This population job fetches data from an external system in the form of the ResultTreeNode (RTN) PC. The ResultTreeNode API was introduced by the Enhanced Generic Push Adapter and can be found in the push-interfaces.jar file located in the UCMDB Server lib folder. For more information, see Achieving Data Push using the Generic Adapter.
The PC RTN contains general node information in the form of attributes as well as an embedded Programs entity that contains software type entities with the relevant attributes.
One PC instance will be mapped to 3 entities in UCMDB:
- a Node CI
- a Running Software CI
- a Composition link CI
For more information about the format of the PC instance, see Population Request Output.
The way in which connector data is mapped to UCMDB data is shown in the following figure:
Let’s analyze the key lines:
The source_instance definition states that we will bring entities into UCMDB and the UCMDB topology that groups these entities is defined by the Nodes and Software Population TQL query. In addition, the data structure returned by the connector that will be used to create the UCMDB data is a ResultTreeNode named PC.
The target_entity tag states that a new UCMDB entity starts here and this entity corresponds to the RootLink element inside the Nodes and Software Population TQL query. This indication also includes the UCMDB CI type of the new entity.
The RootLink entity that will be created will have one attribute, name, whose value will be something like Computer_22 has MySQL Server.
This sample mapping uses manual link population. We recommended using the automatic approach described in Automatic Link Population.
The Population type Attribute
Note that the Node entity has a type attribute. This type indicates the exact CI type that this entity will have in UCMDB. The type attribute is not mandatory, because the entity’s default creation type is obtained from the TQL element it refers to (in this case, Node). However, if we want to return multiple instances of the UCMDB Node CI type and some of the instances are Windows while others are Unix, we can use the type attribute to specify the exact UCMDB creation type. So in this case, we create a getNodeType function inside the Util function script file, which receives as input the PC tree and returns the valid UCMDB CI type identifier (“unix” for Unix and “nt” for Windows).
Note The target_entity type attribute is only available in the context of a Population flow, and its value must be a valid Groovy expression.
We can describe the creation of the Software entity in the same way.