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Content Exchange

Content exchange is an experimental feature: it is currently available only in selected environments and might change in future releases.

Content exchange exports content from one Ataccama ONE environment and imports it into another. Instead of recreating assets manually in each environment, you export them into a content package, which you then publish and import into specific environments.

Content exchange and asset promotion

Using content exchange you can move assets between the environments of your organization, for example, from a development environment to production. Promoting assets instead of recreating them manually helps:

  • Keep environments consistent as every environment receives the same validated structure and data.

  • Avoid the errors of manual recreation, including duplicates.

  • Control which changes are applied. You define what each environment can receive, for example, promoting assets in draft state requires approving changes in the target environment before they are published.

Asset promotion works best in one direction. Author your assets in one environment, treat the other environments as read-only for promoted content, and promote each change along the same path.

How content exchange works

After you prepare your environment for content exchange, you move a content package through three stages:

  1. Export: Select the assets and produce a content package in the source environment.

  2. Publish: Make the package available to selected environments of your organization.

  3. Import: Import the package into the target environment, which creates or updates the promoted assets.

What you can promote

Currently, you can promote the following reference data assets:

  • Table structure: The table definition including attributes with their types and order, relationships to other tables, and the effective dates configuration.

  • Table data: The published records.

  • Hierarchies: Hierarchy definitions built on top of reference data tables.

    Note that, as hierarchies rely on the tables and relationships they are built on, the related tables must already exist in the target environment or you need to include them in the same package.

Note that content packages for reference data don’t include:

  • Record history.

  • Permission and role assignments.

  • Terms and DQ rules added to the exported tables.

Only the published state of an asset is promoted: draft changes are never included in a content package. If changes should be exported in the package, publish them first.

How assets are matched

Assets are matched by their identifiers, not by their names or values. This applies to tables, attributes, relationships, hierarchies, and the records themselves. Because a content package carries those identifiers, promoting the same package to several environments keeps assets aligned.

The exception is the values in a referencing column. A referencing column stores the value of the referenced column, and the import matches that value against the referenced table in the target environment.

The environment that creates an asset assigns its identifier. Two assets created separately in two environments therefore have different identifiers even if they have the same name and the same content, and an import never matches them to each other. If you populated a table by uploading the same file in each environment, the incoming records match none of the existing ones and the import adds them as duplicates. The same applies to structure: an attribute created directly in the target environment has its own identifier, so an incoming attribute is never matched to it.

To keep assets aligned, create them in one environment and let promotion create them everywhere else.

Names are not used for matching. Whether a rename in the source environment reaches the target environment depends on the structure setting. Attribute names are updated only when the package uses the Overwrite setting. Table names are never updated. See Structure changes.

Roles and permissions

Each stage in content exchange requires a dedicated identity provider role. Users without the corresponding role either cannot open the Global settings > Content exchange screen or see the actions as unavailable.

  • contentorchestrator-promotion-admin: Manages the environment list, including connection details and credentials, and the promotion settings. Granted automatically to the environment admins defined in the Ataccama Cloud Portal.

  • contentorchestrator-export-operator: Creates and deletes exports and the unpublished packages they produced.

  • contentorchestrator-promotion-publisher: Publishes content packages to selected environments and withdraws them.

  • contentorchestrator-import-promotion-operator: Views the packages other environments have published to this environment and imports them.

To learn more, see Identity Provider Roles.

In the target environment, all imported changes are attributed to the user who started the import. Therefore, import also requires sufficient permissions for the relevant reference data tables in the target environment. See Target environment permissions for reference data assets.

Limitations of content exchange

  • Environments and their credentials are configured manually.

  • Renaming a table in the source environment doesn’t rename it in the target environment. The rename is not applied and no warning is shown.

  • An asset that can’t be applied but doesn’t fail the import is not listed in the import result. The import still reports as Imported. See An asset was not applied although the import succeeded.

Next steps

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