If you have access to an external DB but do not want to create a program to access the legacy data.
There are a number of ETVL programs that might be able to access your existing data.
Talend is our preferred. After evaluating few ETL tools - Pentaho Kettle, Jitterbit and Talend, we found out that the easiest way to integrate data in Ofbiz is to use Talend.
It's easier to use Talend to extract data (you need to know at least the data structure of the DB) and send these data to OFBiz with xml-rpc
- Connect Talend to the external DB
- For each row, prepare the data (doing transformations, joins with other tables, call web services to get ISO codes)
- Call an ofbiz service to create the data in OFBiz DB (like create product)
OFBiz services can be called as web service (real pain with the way parameters are encoded in maps) or through XML-RPC
2 Comments
Ron Wheeler
This originally said that it could be used without access to the database but Talend or any other ETL solution is going to have trouble without access to the database.
Ron Wheeler
Could someone amplify the process of getting the data into OFBiz. It requires some additional explanation and some links to existing info about formats, web ervices or XML-RPC/.