PowerShell Connector Import All Operation

Overview

The Import All operation imports all entities from the target system. Each of these entities need to be represented with the data in the target system.

For this example, student data is being retrieved from a particular table in a database. Each student has a:

• UniqueIdentifier
• FirstName
• LastName
• EmailAddress
• YearLevel
• and PhoneNumbers

Which each correspond to a particular field in the table. The values in each entity are described by the connector schema.

In this example the schema will be:

New-Field "UniqueIdentifier" "int" $true $false $false
New-Field "FirstName" "string" $false $false $false
New-Field "LastName" "string" $false $false $false
New-Field "EmailAddress" "string" $false $false $false
New-Field "YearLevel" "int" $false $false $false
New-Field "PhoneNumbers" "string.multi" $false $false $false

The PowerShell import all script should then request all of the student information in the database, and give UNIFYBroker a series of entities that represent the data.

Implementation

Entities are presented to UNIFYBroker by first creating them, populating them with data and then finally committing them.

We can achieve all of the above with the following code:

$entity = $entities.Create(); # Create the entity
$entity['UniqueIdentifier'] = 1;
$entity['FirstName'] = 'Jim';
$entity['LastName'] = 'Car';
$entity['Email'] = 'jcar@mail.com';
$entity['YearLevel'] = 5;
$entity['PhoneNumbers'] = @('0400 0000', '3800 0000'); # Populate it with data
$entity.Commit(); # Commit the entity

Values provided in to the field do not necessarily need to be of the same type as the schema. For instance, a string "1" could be provided to an integer field and it will be converted to the integer 1.

One entity should be created for each instance of an object in the target system, so for the example of a Students table, one entity should be created for each student.