There seems to be some trick to really getting the locations and location hierarchies to be imported into Maximo correctly with the Integration Framework.  I have tried many things to get this to work and I here is what I have come up with.  This tutorial comes with an excel file that I manually created with all the locations in one building.  This file also has the relationships needed to build the location hierarchy when importing into Maximo.

This isn’t a step-by-step tutorial on how to import locations, there are already a good amount of tutorials that show how to do just that.  This tutorial is really a guide to how I personally import locations into Maximo and also keep the location hierarchy intact.

First, you can download the excel file which contains a building and all the locations in that building.  You can follow this template for your own location import.  The main things to remember in this file is that you need to manually set the ‘HASCHILDREN’, ‘HASPARENT’, and ‘PARENT’ fields if you want the location hierarchy to be intact when you import them.  You can fill in these fields and then the Maximo MBO will take care of the rest when importing.

For the object structure that I used to import locations, I used the MXOPERLOC object, which is just a pre-defined object within Maximo.  If you are using interface tables, you need to make sure you check the ‘Support Flat Structure’ checkbox.  I use this class because it already has the outbound and inbound processing java classes associated with it.  These classes handle a lot so if you create your own object structure, make sure you add those java classes for outbound and inbound processing.  The fields ‘HASCHILDREN’ and ‘HASPARENT’ are non-persistent fields on the LOCATION object, so make sure you add them before you create your interface tables or else they won’t import right.

On a side note, if you go into the database configuration and find the LOCATION object, the only attributes I have restricted are LOCATIONSID, STATUS and STATUSDATE.  And on the LOCHIERARCHY object I only have LOCHIERARCHYID restricted.

If you have any problems importing locations, please post in our forum.

Update: User qsiraut in our forum was able to import locations and location hierarchies into Maximo and also into different SYSTEMID’s as well by creating a new Object Structure.  His structure has the LOCATION object as the parent object and the LOCHIERARCHY object as it’s child relationship.  It worked for him, so that is another option for importing locations.  Have a look at his forum post for more.