How to develop a custom stage to be used into sequences

Alethesnake · Post by **Alethesnake** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 7:11 am

Hi All,
Is it possible to develop custom stages for sequence usage?

I found several pieces of information regarding the development of custom parallel stages via the creation of a custom operator.
Is it possible to do something similar for sequences?

Thanks a lot for any information.

Regards,

Ale.

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 7:49 am

What kind of "custom stage" are you thinking of? Seems to me pretty much anything "custom" in a Sequence could be handled by either the Routine Activity or Execute Command stages.

Alethesnake · Post by **Alethesnake** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 8:51 am

I think a big lack in datastage is the absence of a complete loop stage.

Actually if I want to loop on the rows of i.e. a flat file, grab its column values and pass them to another job I must use UtilityRunJob routine in a transformer stage.
However in this way I have to "drown" a job call in another job loosing a complete view of the flow from the master sequence (together with other defects of this procedure).
Actually I bypass the problem in the master sequence by:

counting file rows (n)
starting a loop activity 1 to n
"slicing" the first row of the file in the loop and putting it into the user status of the "slicer" job with an adequate column separator
splitting values and finally pass them to the target job..

But it's too laborious..

My goal would be to create a loop activity stage that read from a file and offer a row at each run.

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 9:04 am

You've already got that functionality with the UserVariables and Start/End Loop stages. You manually built something that it could have handled on its own as there's no need to count in your case. Simply use something in the UserVariables stage to supply the contents of the file in a 'delimited list' and the loop stages will automatically iterate through that list.

ray.wurlod · Post by **ray.wurlod** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 1:43 pm

Looping within the Transformer stage is "in the plan" for a future release, maybe even 8.2.

Alethesnake · Post by **Alethesnake** » Wed Apr 08, 2009 3:59 am

ray.wurlod wrote:Looping within the Transformer stage is "in the plan" for a future release, maybe even 8.2. ...

That's a good news

, I hope it will come soon.