A First Look at Spectrum Enterprise Designer

Spectrum Enterprise Designer is a visual tool for creating dataflows. Using this client, you can:

• Create and modify jobs, services, subflows, and process flows
• Inspect and validate dataflows for correctness
• Expose and hide services
• Generate reports

The Spectrum Enterprise Designer window looks like this:

These concepts are important for working with flows:

Canvas

The canvas is the main work area. The picture above shows the canvas open with a dataflow named ValidateUSAndCanadianAddresses. It is a job dataflow, which means it performs batch processing by reading data from a file and writing output to a file. In this case, the dataflow is writing output to two files.

Stage

Stages, represented by icons on the canvas, perform a specific type of activity, such as sorting records, validating addresses, matching similar records, and so on. To add a stage, drag the stage from the Palette (on the left side of the window) onto the canvas.

If a stage requires your attention, a blue circle appears on the icon:

A dataflow cannot run successfully if it has stages that require attention. So, double-click the stage to configure the required settings. Once you have configured all the required settings, the blue circle no longer appears:

Channel

A channel is a connection between two or more stages through which records are passed from one stage to another. In the above example, you can see that the Read from File stage is connected to the ValidateAddress stage with a channel. Records are read into the dataflow in Read from File then sent to ValidateAddress through this channel. ValidateAddress is then connected to Conditional Router through a channel. Conditional Router, which analyzes records and sends them along different paths in a dataflow depending on the conditions defined by the dataflow designer, has two channels going out of it, one to a Write Validated stage and one to a Write Failed stage.

The dot in the middle of a channel may change colors to indicate different conditions:

Red

Indicates an error, such as a type conversion failure that makes a field unusable by the downstream stage.

Yellow

You have removed a field that is needed by a downstream stage.

Blue

Automatic type conversion has successfully converted a field to the data type required by the downstream stage.

Black

A field is being renamed in the channel.

White

No action is being taken on fields.

Port

If you look closely at the stage icons you will notice small triangular or diamond shaped ports on the sides of each stage. A port is the mechanism by which a stage sends data into, or reads data from, a channel. Stages that read data into the dataflow (called "sources") only have output ports since they are always at the start of a dataflow. Stages that send data out of the dataflow (called "sinks") only have input ports since they are always at the end of a dataflow. All other stages have both input and output ports. In addition, some stages have error ports, which are used to output records that cause errors during the stage's processing, and some stages have report ports, which are used to generate reports about the stage's output.

The Spectrum Enterprise Designer window provides these features: