Better control over processing order in import profiles
When importing records it would be really useful to have an option to control the order of the processing steps involved in the import, and maybe to add additional processing steps.
We have two use cases where the current order has not worked out for us:
When importing records with EOD, the EOD will be created from the original record rather than the normalized record. This was a special use case, where a change in the originating system prevented EOD to be embedded in a correct way. Had we been able to process the records with normalization rules we could still use EOD-import, but now we have to resort to manual order creation.
When creating electronic portfolios, the extraction of the URL data happens from the original record rather than the normalized record, preventing both adjusting indicators so that some links are skipped, deleting unwanted URL:s completely and to alter the actual link used. This use case seems much more common, where incoming records can contain multiple URL:s in the same field, but where we want to decide which one should be used in linking.
When doing automatic import/export between systems, it seems really wasteful to have to implement a separate preprocessing application sitting in between, when Almas normalization process gives us all the power we need to perform the task given - only at the wrong time relative other processes.
Both our use cases would be solved by running the normalization earlier in the import process, but I’ve found another idea from 2015 suggesting a normalization step in a later state than the current. Ideally it would be possible to add normalization at different places in the process, to accommodate for different use cases.
(At a minimum, the complete order of steps for the different kind of import processes should be properly documented. It has taken us far to much testing and long waiting in support cases to even know if it would be possible to achieve what we want.
There is currently little documentation of the order things are happening. We have raised this issue in support cases 00605411 and 00650625. Some basic overview is listed in the support document [Import, Export, Publishing][iep], but even that seems to be wrong as data extraction for EOD doesn’t really happen after normalization which that page implies.
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Samuel Libot commented
Hello. We have similar issues with ED and portfolios URL.
Our case about EOD is the 00904797 and Ex Libris pointed out this idea to support.Hope it'll get more popular and taken into account.