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Designing Jobs

BlueSky Integration Studio's intuitive, property-based interface makes designing integration jobs quick and painless. This section will walk you through designing integration jobs. Designing a job can be broken down into 4 basic steps:

Designing the process flow

Every data object must flow through a Join object. Think of the Join object as the black box in the middle of any process that performs the actual mapping and transformation work. Each Join object is a separate process within a job.

Dragging an object onto the designer window

- Click on the data object in the toolbar while holding the left mouse button down.

- Drag the object onto the designer window and release the left mouse button.

Connecting the data objects using the connection object

- Click the connection object in the toolbar.

- The button will stay in a pushed state indicating you will be drawing a connection line.

- Click on the source data object holding down the left mouse button and drag the connection line to the destination object and release the mouse button.

Understanding the Execution Path

You can have multiple Join objects in a job design. When BlueSky Integration Studio compiles your job it goes through a complex set of algorithms to determine the execution path for job. The execution path is essentially a dependency tree which looks at the job design and determines which objects are dependent upon one another. For instance, the "Brand Code Lookup" table below is required for the "Sales Mapping" process to run correctly, so the "Load Brands" Join process has to run first.

The execution path is calculated automatically anytime a job is compiled. You can run the execution path manually as well by selecting the Build->Execution Path menu item, or by clicking the Execution Path icon on the toolbar.

Complex jobs

A more complex job might look like this:

Let's walk through this job step-by-step:

- First the "Load Brands" join process will run which will load brand master information into memory for fast lookups (see Hash Tables)

- Next, the "Mapping" join process will run. This process loads sales data from a Text File into a SQL Server database table which encapsulates the main fact table in a data mart. Also notice that any rejected records that fall out (via filters and/or validation code) will get loaded into the "Rejects" table.

- The information in the "Data Mart" is then summarized and loaded into two tables, one by Brand and one by Customer for use in an web-based Executive Dashboard.

Aliases

What's up with those little object aliases (a1, a2, a3, etc...). Object Aliases serve two main purposes.

1. Each object in BlueSky Integration Studio must have a unique name. Essentially, BlueSky Integration Studio is building a program behind the scenes that will eventually get compiled into an executable or .NET component. Each object in your design becomes a unique class in the program's source code, hence it must be unique. You can name the Alias anything you want through object properties, however no spaces or special characters are allowed.

2. Aliases come in handy when you are coding your transformation code in VB.NET. Since each object is a class, and that class contains properties (the columns), it then becomes much easier to code. For instance, say for instance you named one of your Aliases 'emp' for Employee information. You would then access the fields in 'emp' like: emp.FIRST_NAME

Designing the process flow
Defining properties
Mapping and Transformation
Compiling Jobs

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