Import Manager and Display Fields

I've been using SRM-MDM 3.0 for a couple of months and 1 fundamental MDM design has always bothered me and I was hoping to get some resolve on this.

The purpose of Display Field is 2 folds:

1. Display the field in the Catalog Search UI for a lookup table: i.e. if both Supplier Name and ID are Display Fields, then in the Search UI, both fields are displayed to the end-user. If only Supplier ID was the display field, then in the UI only the ID is displayed.

- From a usability pov, tables such as Supplier and Product Group should have the name or description fields displayed in the Search UI as the numeric values are meaningless to the end-users.

2. Display field ALSO affect what is the key used to import data into a table. So if Supplier ID is the display field for Supplier table, then in Import Manager, the Supplier ID values are displayed and must be mapped to the source values.

- From an importing pov, mapping values should always be an index-like field, such as Supplier ID or Product Group ID, or ISO, and usually never the actual name or description field.

But SAP has tied the two together. So in order to display the name/description to the end-user, we must enable the name/description field as a Display Field. But we also want to map based on the index/ID field, so we also enable the index/ID field as a Display Field. Now in Import Manager, we have two Display Fields for a table (i.e. Supplier ID and Supplier Name for Supplier table) and I've noticed some issues with this:

1. You import file must have BOTH values (index/ID and the name/description fields) in the source, in order to Automap. If your source file only has 1 field, like in MECCM when extracting ECC contract, ONLY the Supplier ID, or Category ID is extracted, Automap is not possible. What is funny is that standard SAP extract program only extracts the ID fields, BUT the standard SAP repository has the name/description fields as the Display Field. Automap is a must for tables like Product Group where hundreds of lines can make manual mapping a pain.

2. I also noticed you cannot Add values to a table that has 2 Display Fields, you can only map to existing values. The Add button is grayed out.

With all that said, when you're replication ECC Contract Data using MECCM, for tables like Supplier and Product Group, what fields should be set as Display Fields, and if there are multiple Display Fields, what special setting needs to be done in Import Manager to enable automapping? Even standard SAP Import Map (_MDMContractDataTransmission_ProductID) throws errors when multiple fields are set as Display Fields.

I'm not familiar with the partitioning function, and I've seen PDF's about it, but don't really see how it could be helpful. I've also read someone suggesting changing the DF's before import, which I think is unacceptable, as this requires unloading/loading repositories everytime an import happens.

Thanks for reading my paragraph and any input is greatly appreciated.

Edited by: Derek Xu on Apr 30, 2009 6:50 PM