Import Engine for importing the metadata currently for Client's online testing

The Customer

The client is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Its Internet Protocol-based (IP) networking solutions are the foundation of the Internet and most corporate, education, and government networks around the world. It provides the broadest line of solutions for transporting data, voice and video within buildings, across campuses, or around the world.

The Business Challenge

Import Engine project is a corn application running in the background for importing the metadata currently for Client's Online Testing. This assessment data is generated by Client's Online Testing user for various Certification tests. This project has to interact with two other applications , one is validation engine and another is Teamsite from interwoven.The metadata gets imported at pre defined intervals to LCMS database as well as to Teamsite (File based System).

The Solution

Application Functionality:

This cron has the Time Based Trigger that invoke the application as per the setting on production server. Time based trigger internally calls the Event Handler which is a multithreaded application handling various events for import engine. The events are:

• Validation
• Build and Merge
• Submit
• Result Processing

Metadata is given as an xml that comprise of actual xml data that goes to LCMS and teamsite and the header elements that are designed specifically for import engine.
There are many internal and external vendors generating the metadata and content, this is the intellectual property for the client that remains with vendor and vendors has the full control over it. The client pays for this intellectual property.

Business Critical:

This data generated globally and by various vendors, some of the internal vendors are COLT, CUT, CB, EMS, and external vendor like KnowledgeNet. For internal vendors there are no security barrier the are inside the firewall but to bring the content from external vendor who are outside the firewall is more critical. Current solution is offered for internal vendor only to bring only metadata to LCMS. This project has achieved a great success in meeting the need and cron is running in production since April 12th 2002 successfully.

Support:

Only in case of internal error , e-mail is generated and when the errors are fixed the manual intervention is required to move the files that are to be reprocessed. No full time support is necessary.

Maintenance:

Since it runs a cron in background , this particular project doesn’t have any maintenance activities.

Enhancements:

Enhancements are done for redesign of code for better performance, addition of some functionalities like e-mail generation, better validation of header elements. Converting hash to source XML and calling validation service for three different calls.