In-Bound Data Feeds
Chrome River accepts file feeds for many different types of data
Chrome River provides admin tools to manually enter company / organization data, such as people, allocations (matters) and entities (data lists), however, most companies / organizations elect to automate the population and maintenance of data into Chrome River. One means of accomplishing this is via data feeds. Data feeds are files (adhering to a specified format) transmitted from our customers to their Chrome River secure FTP site. Chrome River retrieves the files from the FTP site on a recurring basis and loads the data to the Chrome River database.
There are specific file layouts for each type of data feed. The Chrome River Data Feed Specifications document (below) provides details for creating all feeds accepted by Chrome River:
Chrome River Data Feed Specifications:
General Information about Feeds can be found below:
| File Format | Plain text encoded in UTF-8 or ISO_8859_1 format |
| File Name |
<FeedName>-<Environment>-<CustomerCode>-YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM.txt File name is case sensitive—it must be capitalized as shown above. QA references apply only if your organization is subscribed to UAT Naming Variables Environment: qa or prod Example Pipe-delimited file. |
| File Data Delimiter |
- There should be a pipe character ('|') between all data fields and should include all optional fields whether they include data or not. Any column in RED is "REQUIRED" to have data. All other columns can be empty but still need delimiters for placeholders. - The first row of each file should include a pipe-delimited list of the column names. - Each new record should be on a separate row. - The last column should have a pipe after it. |
| File Transfer |
1) Log in to the Chrome River FTP site via SFTP at the appropriate address: C3 Production – sftp://ftp.eu1.chromeriver.com C5 Production – sftp://ftp.ca1.chromeriver.com Example |
| File Contents | Consult the individual feed spec to understand whether the feed is a Full Feed type or an Incremental type. If the feed spec mentions that "a full list" of values must be provided, this indicates that the feed is a full feed type and will do a complete replacement of the data type within Chrome River with the contents of the file. |
For your convenience, we have provided template spreadsheets in the data feed spec for our most common data feeds and some other additional ones (below).
- Person Feed - Populates company / organization employees (users of Chrome River and/or employees selectable as internal guests on expense line items)
- Allocation (Matter) Feed - Populates a set of "cost objects" that expense line items can be charged to
- Entity Feed - Populates various data "lists" defined in Chrome River
- Paid Expense Feed - Updates payment status of expense reports processed through the customer's financial system
To use the templates, just type values into the spreadsheets columns and properly formatted records will be generated to the far right of row. You may include the generated records in your data feed: