I many cases the data for features and observations that you want to keep in Redbex is available digitally as files, in databases or in other data sources. The data import allows you to connect to these data sources and import data for features and / or observations to  Redbex.

When importing data Redbex must of course know how to read data in the data source and how to interpret the data in that data source. Redbex therefore provides a set of import types that can handle different types of data sources and different types data formats.

Any import is performed in two main steps. In Step 1 the import process connects to the specified data sources and transforms the data using the logic of the import type to an intermediate data format. In step 2 the import process takes data from that intermediate format and persists it to the Redbex Application Server database.

Figure 1: Main steps of the import process