Pentaho Data Integration Beginner's Guide

Avoiding coding by using purpose built steps

You saw through the exercises how powerful the JavaScript and Java Class steps are for helping you in your transformations. In older versions of PDI, coding JavaScript was the only means you had for doing specific tasks. In the latest releases of PDI, actual steps appeared that eliminate the need for coding in many cases. Here you have some examples of these steps:

• Formula step: Before the appearance of this step, there were a lot of functions—such as the right or left text functions—that you could only solve with JavaScript.
• Analytic Query: This step offers a way to retrieve information from rows before or after the current row.
• Split field to rows: This step is used to create several rows from a single ...