ReStructuring E-list

[ballytech]

I need to make a major overhaul to our current elist structure. Does anyone have any tips or best practices to minimalize the data loss. I need to add a few new rollups and many new child nodes.

[gidster]

A couple of suggestions:

Make sure you Backup your database!

Ideally do the E-List changes when no Users are online (as you want to try and avoid any data loss if you have to restore from your Backup)

Adding new E-List Consolidation Nodes is no problem...add as many as you like!

The real challenge is what to do about your lowest level Contribution Nodes (these are the ones that contain all of your data)

If you change your EListItemID field, then you WILL lose the data that belongs to this E-List.  You can safely change your EListDisplayName field.  However, there are times when parts of Cognos uses the EListItemID field and not the Display name... this can make life confusing.

For example...we started out with a single office in Germany.  At the time it seemed sensible to call it "Germany".  Since then we have opened up offices in Hamburg and Cologne.  So we now had to decide what to do... in the end we renamed the Display Name of Germany to Munich (where the first office was based).  We added our two new items for Hamburg and Cologne (no issues with adding new items at all).  And we had to also add a Consolidation Node for all of Germany.  We could not call this Germany (as this was already being used by what has now become Munich) SO instead we called it TOTAL GERMANY

The upshot is that we now have several places where Analyst refers to what is now Munich as Germany...and if you have a lot of these it can get quite difficult to keep track of them all.

Another thing to watch out for is if your restructure has a given E-List 'splitting' in two or more sub-sections.  So say you have E-List "ABC" splitting into "A" "B" and "C".  Now you have to decide what you want to do.  You could simply rename (using the DisplayName field) ABC to "A", and then add your two new "B" and "C" components.  Doing this is probably the easiest solution HOWEVER all of your history that was in ABC is now labelled as being in A.  You would have to decide if the effort of splitting the history is worth it.

If it is absolutely VITAL to have the same EListItemID fields and EListDisplayName fields, then you are into a whole other realm.  You would have to do things like Publish all your data using a View Publish...Take the view and convert it into a Tab delimited text file.  Rename all your E-Lists as required and then use Copy Load Prepare to get back to how you want to be.

There are probably some other things to watch out for, but hopefully this will get you started!