Troubleshooting DMT loads

When a DMT load misbehaves, start with DMT’s own results: the error text for each failed row usually names the missing record or invalid field. The problems below are the ones where the message doesn’t make the cause obvious.

Menu load: Company must be blank but present

Symptom: a DMT load that updates menus (the Ice.Menu table) fails to find the menus, or behaves differently for some menus than others.

Cause: most menu records are system-wide. Their Company value is blank unless the menu has been copied into a specific company. DMT looks records up by their key, so a load that fills in your company ID won’t match a system-wide menu.

Fix: include the Company column in the file even though the template doesn’t mark it as required, and leave it empty for system-wide menus. Only fill it for menus that really belong to a company.

Child rows fail because a parent is missing

Symptom: operation or material rows fail with messages about an invalid part, revision or operation.

Cause: the load order was wrong, or an earlier load partly failed and nobody noticed.

Fix: load parents first (Part, Part Plant, Part Revision, then operations, then materials) and reload the failed rows once their parents exist. See Load methods of manufacture with DMT.

An update can’t find records that are clearly there

Symptom: rows fail as “not found” (or an add creates duplicates) for keys you can see on screen.

Cause: the key in the file differs from the one in the database, most often a leading space that Excel or DMT dropped, or leading zeros Excel removed.

Fix: check the first character code and cell formats as described in Excel and data gotchas.

Text comes in with odd characters or on one line

Cause: the file was exported from Epicor to Excel, which replaced line breaks with the record separator character.

Fix: substitute CHAR(30) with CHAR(10) before loading. See Excel and data gotchas.

Deleting an operation fails or leaves materials unlinked

Cause: materials still relate to the operation being deleted.

Fix: re-point the materials first, then delete the operation. See Resequence operations with DMT.

A load triggers emails, prints or other side effects

Cause: DMT runs through the business objects, so method and data directives fire for every row.

Fix: for large loads, disable the noisy directives for the duration, or add a condition that skips them for the user running the load. Remember to re-enable them. See Common BPM problems if a directive behaves unexpectedly during a load.