Update existing assets in your databases

• 1. What is a resource update?
• 2. In practice, how to update new resources within an existing database?

Updating resources is useful if you want to modify the attributes of several resources in bulk.

These modifications can be made across several databases.

1. What is a resource update?

A resource update is done using an Excel file. This will contain all the resources to be updated. These elements can be found in different databases.

The rows represent the resources to be modified. The columns represent the attributes of each of these resources.

To facilitate resource updating, you should start by exporting the resources you want to update. An Excel file will be generated. On this exported file, you need to modify the attribute values. Then, you can re-import the file onto the platform. Thus, the resources will be updated.

On the Excel file, the columns appear in the following order:

• "Code" column: The code of the resource to be updated.
• "Name" column: The name of the resource to be updated. This column must necessarily have a value.
• "Parent" column: If a parent resource is defined, then you must specify the code of this element.
• "Family (code)" column: The code of the database to which the resource belongs.
• The attributes of the different elements
• The attributes of the resources should already exist on the platform. The spelling of the attribute name must be exactly the same on the import file.
• The attribute values must respect the typology of the defined attribute on the platform. If the attribute is of type "number", all values must be numeric only.
• Only the attributes present in the Excel file will be updated.

2. In practice, how to update new resources within an existing database?

Setting the scene: Let's imagine a company that has a Engines database. This database contains 100 engines.

We want to add a new attribute named "Nominal Power" for all the resources present in "Engines".

It would be too long to manually add the "Nominal Power" attribute for each of the 100 resources. So we will proceed with a resource update.

We will first export all the resources contained in the "Engines" database. We will then add the attribute "Nominal Power" to all of these resources.

1. In the Databases tab, go to the Engines database.
2. Select all resources and then click on Export.
3. On the downloaded Excel file, add a "Nominal Power" column.
4. Fill in values for the Nominal Power attribute.
5. Return to the Databases tab. Go to the Engines database. Click on Import.
6. Select your Excel file. You can check the correspondence between the attributes of the Excel file and the attributes on your Ermeo platform.
7. Click on Next. The resources will be imported. The "Updated Resources" box will contain the number of resources updated (here 4).

In case of errors, an error file is generated. Within this file are the resources that could not be updated. The resources in error are highlighted in red. You can download this file and make modifications on it. Then, you can re-import it to update the resources.

To go further

• In the error file, you can place the mouse over the red column to visualize a description of the error.
• Updating resources on the platform is done in the order in which the elements are found within the import file.
• It is not possible to cancel an import in progress.
• You can import new resources with an import file.
• The imports/exports page summarizes all the imports carried out.
• The parent (without the code), database (without the code), created_at and created_by columns should not appear in the import file.