It would be great to have a Whatif capability in DMT, allowing you to simulate an import. Whilst having a good backup regime when doing imports it good it would be great to be able to do some simulation before actually running it for real.
We created an E10DMT database - if we want to simulate we shutdown the E10DMT instance in Epicor admin, delete the db in sql and then restore the previous nights live backup as E10DMT - I’m a one man band IT team so I have no hand offs in this process so makes it straightforward and takes less than 10 minutes.
The one obvious reason why I doubt Epicor will incorporate is the potential impact on performance if someone tries a big what if import during production hours particularly those not on premise - even a theoretical what if import will be firing lots of data validation triggers even though it is not writing to the db.
I agree wholheartedly, but I was sort of viewing it from the “Here are the required fields, now I want build the template up” perspective. More often than not when testing a DMT template you are only testing with a handful of records anyway, so perhaps the whatif had a row restrictions on it. Than would at least prevent another face palm moment. Even in a test environment just as you mentioned having to restore a database is just another task that takes time.
You could also argue that having What-if like Powershell gives a bit ofcudos, even if you are flattering MS. 
So basically, you want the validate to not only check the record headers, but check the format of the data right? Or do you want it to go one step further and whether or not the data actually meshes with what you have in the system? (like an invalid part number or something?)
I guess what I am trying to say is wrapping everything in the DMT in a transaction and committing the data if there are no errors. Probably pretty impractical from an architecture perspective, but would save a bit of hassle, so you would want it to validate against data in the db. Sort of having the ability to have the Add/delete checboxes unticked and…hold on… (goes off to DMT to check what happens when you untick all checkboxes and process)…
There you go you can…Now just to get some data that has known issues and see what happens.
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I too have been SAD
(System Administrator by Default)
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