Specifications Partner Import

Purpose

There are many situations where the user needs to import Partner addresses and personal details into their instance of the OpenPetra database:

• The Personnel department receives the data of a new member of staff from the sending field.
• Data is collected on a webserver from partners that have entered their own details. This data must be imported into the office database.
• Data from legacy databases should be easy to import when migrating to OpenPetra.
• Generated test data can be imported this way too.

Challenges

• partners might already exist in the OpenPetra database. We do not want duplicate partners after the import.
• addresses might already exist in the OpenPetra database, which should be reused.
• If an address changes for a partner, should we ask if the address of other partners at that location should be changed too? What happens to the old address, will it be made invalid by setting the expiring date?
• Partners might have entered wrong data, which needs to be monitored and filtered before importing into the office database.
• Once data has been imported, we do not want to manually review the same data again. So the web database should know the partner key in the office database, fixed data should be committed back into the web database etc.