This documentation supports the 21.05 version of BMC Helix CMDB.To view an earlier version, select the version from the Product version menu

Normalization and best practice relationship rules

You can use BMC Helix CMDB to normalize relationships along with CIs, based on the relationship rules that are shipped with the product. You can also create additional rules for normalizing relationships. The out-of-the-box rules are listed in the Relationship Normalization tab. For more information, see Mapping Your Data to BMC CMDB 9.1.00 Classes PDF document, available on PDFs-and-videos page.

For information about creating relationship rules, see Creating-a-relationship-rule. You can use the inline, continuous, or batch modes of normalization for relationship names. 

The Relationship normalization feature option in the Normalization Engine is enabled for all data sets by default. If you do not want to normalize relationship classes for an individual data set, you can disable the Relationship normalization feature option for that data set. For more information about how to disable or enable relationship normalization, see Configuring-normalization-settings-for-datasets. 

Warning

We recommend that you not disable the Relationship normalization feature in the Configuration Editor, based on the out-of-the-box relationship rules that are shipped with the product. Other BMC products that consume the configuration data in BMC Helix CMDB reference the out-of-the-box relationship rules, and disabling the Relationship normalization feature can result in errors in these products.

The out-of-the-box rules for relationship classes are framed using the following guidelines:

  • The rules can modify only the Name attribute for the relationship classes.
  • The rules are defined in BMC Helix CMDB depending upon the source and destination classes for a relationship. 
    For example, a rule can be defined to set the Name attribute of the relationship instance with the value set to CONTAINEDDOMAIN if the relationship class is BMC_Component, the source class is BMC_AdminDomain, and destination class also is BMC_AdminDomain.
  • The rules apply to all data sets in BMC Helix CMDB. To define a rule for a specific data set, include the datasetID attribute in the rule qualification.
  • When rules are set for a relationship class at both the parent and child class levels, the child class rule overrides the parent class rule.

 

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