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After having written the two articles on importing and exporting data in Maximo, this morning I woke up with an insane idea.
Is it Excel capable of parsing an XML structures and issue an HTTP calls to Maximo Integration Framework?
Did you already got my idea? I switched on my tablet and did few searches. Yeeesss! I have all the pieces of the puzzle!
The idea is to integrate Maximo and Excel using HTTP calls to a MIF Object Service. This allows to avoid passing through the generation and conversion of CSV files to exchange data between Maximo and Excel.
Let's see how to do it.
Maximo Object Structure
Open Integration > Object Structure application and create a new entry.
- Object Structure: D-PERSON
- Description: Demo Person Object Structure
- Consumed By: INTEGRATION
- Support Flat Structure: True
- Source Objects: PERSON
Remove unwanted attributes from the Object Structure. This will simplify the exchanged data and will greatly improve performances of the integration.
Select the Include/Exclude Fields menu and check all the Exclude check-boxes except the following:
- PERSONID
- FIRSTNAME
- LASTNAME
- DISPLAYNAME
Excel
Download the sample Excel spreadsheet. Open it and enable macros if prompted.
Open the Visual Basic editor. On Excel 2007 and 2010 you may need to enable the "Developer" tab as described here (Excel 2007) or here (Excel 2010).
Open the "Module 1" and modify the following row to match you Maximo environment.
Const URL = "http://MAXIMOHOST/meaweb/os/"
Now go back to the "Query" Excel spreadsheet and click on the "Query" button. If everything goes fine your spreadsheet will be automatically filled with all the people whose name starts with the letter A.
Isn't it really cool?
If you want even more 'cooling' you can take a look at the followup article about synching data.
Labels: excel, http, integration, intermediate, mif
