Preserving table hierarchy in Instance Data Replication
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- UpdatedJan 30, 2025
- 3 minutes to read
- Yokohama
- Instance Data Replication
Decide if you want to replicate a parent-child table hierarchy and what strategy to use for replicating the data in Instance Data Replication (IDR).
Before you create a replication set, determine if the table that you want to replicate is part of a parent-child table hierarchy. If it is, decide if you want to preserve the hierarchy and whether to replicate the data from the parent perspective (retaining only columns belonging to the parent table) or from the child perspective (retaining all columns that belong to the child tables). Review the following available strategies.
- Strategy 1: Preserve the entire hierarchy and replicate child columns
- You can preserve the entire hierarchy, including all of the child table columns, by creating
an outbound entry for each child table, and specifying a sys_class_name filter for each child
table.
For example, to replicate the Task table and ensure that all of the columns from all of the child tables are included, specify the following:
And so forth, for all of the child tables, including filters with each table for the sys_class_name.
With this strategy, records are inserted into each child table on the consumer, including data from the columns that belong to each child table on the producer.
- Strategy 2: Preserve the hierarchy, but don't replicate child columns
- To preserve the hierarchy but only replicate columns from the parent table, replicate the
parent table and include the Class Name [sys_class_name] field in the Included
Fields list. Including the Class Name field maintains the distinction between
parent and child records on the consumer instance.For example, if you want to replicate the Task table and its children (Incident, Problem, Change Request), but only replicate the columns that belong to the Task table, specify the following:
Table 2. Outbound entry Table Included Fields Task Class Name In this strategy, the sys_class_name column on the consumer Task table receives entries for the parent table (task) and child tables (incident, problem, and change), and records are inserted into the respective child tables on the consumer. However, without the sys_class_name filter, the columns that are unique to each child table are not replicated.
- Strategy 3: Ignore the hierarchy, and only replicate parent table data
- To ignore the hierarchy and only replicate parent records, replicate the parent table and
exclude the Class Name [sys_class_name] field from the Included Fields
list. Excluding the Class Name field removes the distinction between parent and child records
on the consumer instance. All replicated records on the consumer will be parent table
records.For example, if you want to replicate records from the Task table and simply consider all records as tasks for reporting or auditing purposes, specify the following:
Table 3. Outbound entry Table Included Fields Task Any fields except for Class Name In this strategy, when you replicate the Task table, all replicated records have a value of task in the sys_class_name column, and no columns belonging to the child tables are replicated.
Changing legacy behavior
You can replicate the full parent-child table hierarchy in replication sets created prior to Utah, but you must create separate outbound entries for each table and you must include the respective sys_class_name filter with each table. This means you can use strategy 1 above to replicate the hierarchy, but not strategies 2 or 3.
Alternatively, you can use any strategy by editing the producer replication set and changing the Use Table Name field value to True. Note that this field is hidden by default and you must add it to your Producer Replication Set form in order to change it. The Use Table Name field defaults to True for all new producer replication sets that you create starting in the Utah release.
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