When you design and implement jobs and transformations in PDI, you not only want certain tasks to be accomplished, but also want a work that can be reused, easy to maintain, and more. This chapter explains several techniques meant to accomplish these objectives. We will cover the following topics:
- Using Kettle variables to give flexibility to your transformations
- Reusing part of your transformations using mappings
- Copying and getting rows as part of a process flow
- Iterating the execution of transformations
The basics about Spoon have already been covered. Therefore, in this chapter, we will not give much space to details such as how to configure a Text file input step. Instead, we will focus on the techniques you will learn.
If you get into trouble, you can refer to earlier chapters, browse the Pentaho Transformation Step Reference at https://help.pentaho.com/Documentation/8.0/Products/Data_Integration/Transformation_Step_Reference, or simply download and browse the material for the chapter from the book's site.