As I have promised some time ago, this article will handle the importing of external data into ADAM. Again, this blog post merely presents some general ideas on the subject, and thus does not imply that these are the only available options to achieve this.

Importing data into ADAM

Using the external system's extensibility mechanisms

The first option you have for importing data in ADAM relies heavily on the export capabilities of the external system itself. When implementing this method, you can use the ADAM API to create records, classifications, users and other data as changes from the external system are committed. Needless to say that this method requires extensive knowledge of the other system's development tools and APIs.

For this method to work reliably, the external system needs to trigger events or provide event-like extensibility points which you can hook into to use the ADAM API to represent the data in ADAM.

Using a custom indexer

The second option for importing data into ADAM I'd like to discuss is to use a custom indexer that will create classifications and records parsed from a series of XML files. These files should be created in whichever external system you're using and subsequently dropped into a predefined folder, which is monitored using the ADAM file system watcher.

Using a Windows Service

Another option is to completely roll your own import service, much like we did in the previous blog post, but of course, the other way around. In this scenario, you should use the ADAM API to create and update the records and classifications that represent the data from the external system.

The external system's API should be used to poll all data since the last import session and then represent this data in ADAM using our API.

Drawing conclusions

Since this side of the story depends on the external system's capabilities a lot, there isn't much room for useful sample code. However, I have attached the source code to the previous article (exporting data from ADAM) here, while the importing part is left as an excercise for the reader.

As always, we stand ready to comment on this article series, just drop a note down below.

Happy coding!