Tideway Export enables you to publish data from Tideway Foundation into BMC Atrium CMDB 2.0, a Relational Database (RDBMS) and all systems that can accept CSV files. Tideway Foundation data is exported by creating an exporter, which is a combination of a mapping set with an adapter configuration. These concepts are introduced in this section.

Exporters

An exporter is the combination of a mapping set and an adapter configuration.

• The mapping set is a set of mapping files. These allow you to determine which data to extract from Foundation and how to transform it according to the target data model.
• The adapter configuration is used to determine where to publish the data.

Mapping Files and Sets

When performing an export, the exporter needs to know which data to read from the Foundation data store and where to place it. It does this with mapping files. A mapping file is an XML document containing the following information:

1. A Foundation data store query specifying which data to export.
2. Information on how Tideway Export must restructure (or transform) the query result in order to make it usable by the system being exported to (ie. to comply with the remote system's schema).

A mapping set is a set of mapping files that are used to carry out the export. In order to do an export using a mapping set, the exporter will run the query from each one of the mapping files in the set. A typical export requires more than one query of the data store. For example, one query to get Hosts, another to get BusinessApplicationInstances, etc.

For further information about mapping file formats see The Mapping File Format.

Adapters and Adapter Configurations

Tideway Export supports the following adapters:

• BMC Atrium
• CMDB 2.0
• RDB
• CSV

An adapter configuration typically contains the information needed to connect to the target destination:

• Target host
• Port
• Username
• Password

You can create multiple adapter configurations. For example, if you needed to export data from Foundation to two Atrium CMDB Servers ("development" and "production") then you would create two adapter configurations for the BMC Atrium CMDB 2.0 adapter, one for each destination.

Permitting Users to Edit the Adapter Configuration

The cmdb-export-administrator user group gives permissions for users to edit the adapter's configuration. To add a user to this group:

1. From the Foundation appliance user interface, log in to Tideway Foundation.
2. Click the Administration tab in the top-right corner of the window.
3. Click the Users icon in the Security channel.
4. Edit the profiles of any user that you want to administer Tideway Export. Add them to the cmdb-export-administrator group. Ensure that they are also members of the public group.