A recent HotFix release offers a new option in the Integration Wizard: Apportionment Mapping. Keeping in mind that the HotFix program is in place primarily to provide customers regular fixes to priority issues that might arise in the application, and not a platform for releasing new functionality, I was surprised to see this new option and keen to try it out.
This article takes a look at the new Apportionment Mapping option in the Integration Wizard and gives you some insight into how it’s used when setting up apportionment mapping for your projects.
As you probably already know, Apportionment Mapping isn’t a new feature in Cobra; what’s new is that you can now import apportionment mappings from a CSV file via the Integration Wizard, rather than setting them up in the Apportionment Mapping tool. I wanted to try out this feature and see how it worked. Interestingly nothing about this is mentioned in the release notes for HotFix#1, however it is explained in the Online help. I found it by going to the Apportionment Mapping dialog box entry of the help index and then clicking on the Importing Apportionment Mapping Data link.
I was mainly concerned with finding out what the format for such an import file should look like. In the Importing Apportionment Mapping Data help topic is a File Format link that give you the headers you’ll need for your Apportionment Mapping CSV file.
The headers are as shown in the next figure.
I created an Excel worksheet with these headers, saved it as a CSV file along with some data for loading into a small apportionment testing project.
The next step was to try out the Apportionment Mapping option in the Integration Wizard. This is a simple dialog that requires only the project name and the location of the apportionment mapping CSV.
Using the template I created did generate a warning due to the header row I left in the file. However it was just letting me know that the header row had been skipped and the data row did load successfully.
I also noticed that I had to close and reopen the project to see the values appear in the Project | Apportionment Mapping… | Apportionment Mapping dialog; but I was able to calculate apportionment immediately after loading the mapping file, so the data had definately arrived in the system, it just wasn’t displayed before I reopened the project.
So there it is folks, you can now load apportionment values via a CSV file. So if you have some sophisticated apportionment to setup, this could be a nice timesaver for you. You can click on the following link to download my Apportionment Mapping Template CSV file and try this out for yourselves.
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