Clarity

I need to automate a daily download of a file from Clarity. The manual process is:

1. From the Clarity PPM Home page. I click on Home and a menu pops up. 

2. From that menu, under the Data Extraction sub-menu. I select Data Extraction dashboard.

3. The Data Extraction dashboard me to a list of files that I can select to view or download.

4. I select one or more files

5. I scroll to the bottom of the page

6. I click the download button

I need to implement an automatic download. That could be in a .NET program, a SQL Server Integration Services package, an FTP job or anything else really. My requirement is to move this from a manual process to one that is completely hands-free.

FYI Our Clarity PPM version as reported by the About page is 13.2.0.472 09 04

Bit confused about what the "Data Extraction Dashboard" is - is that some custom functionality or stock Clarity functionality that I just am just not aware of?

But in theory, anything that is surfaced in Clarity (contents of a portlet, underlying data) etc can be pulled out of the system via the XOG interface, and so can be "automated" in any number of ways - its "just an interface" really. So anything at your "client-end" that can construct and call XOG (over SOAP) would work.

The data extraction dashboard is actually quite cool and you use native SQL in the Query. The interesting part is that in the currentl implementation you can not only read from the database, you can write as well. This was one of the first tests I performed as I wanted to ensure that you could not. Due to this, we limited who could access it and all queries had to go through the standard development process and testing.

Mike that sounds great!  Could you explain a bit more and maybe post an example? 

The Data Extraction Tool is from CA. I would recommend that you speak with your account rep and have them demo it to you. Otherwise, give me a few days and see what I can write up for you.

Hmmm.. that's kinda how I came here in the first place.  CA told me that it couldn't be done OOTB but that they would happy to develop a custom solution ($$$$)

If in case Data Extraction Dashboard is a custom object with instances of documents within it, then probably you can write a Process with a custom gel script within it that will allow you to download all the files within this custom object on auto-start or on update. Refer the link here for some similar knowledge about the use of gel script for downloading files. You can then create a Job and link the Process to the Job (Execute a Process) that can be scheduled to run as per your requirements.

Let me know if this works!

Suhail.

Given it's a page with checkboxes and a download button, I am suspecting it's an HTML portlet - at which point the location/access of those files and the authentication required to retrieve them is anybody's guess.

More details will need to be provided, or else the portlet's author will need to be consulted, in order to understand the setup and the feasibility of any solutions.

Looking at your requirement Selenium could be 1 option of capturing the daily steps which you perform, prepare the suite of commands and invoke them wherever you want to do those repetitive steps.

Br,

Sandeep