Using Source Designers

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Overview of Source Designers

Source designer wizards enable you to generate metadata for tables or external files that exist in physical storage. In most cases, a source designer displays a list of tables that currently exist in a library, and it generates metadata for one or more tables that you select. The metadata is generated from the physical structure of the tables.

The ability to generate metadata for one or more existing tables makes a source designer a convenient tool for creating the metadata for a set of sources in a SAS ETL Studio job. However, a source designer wizard is not limited to generating the metadata for a source in a job. After the metadata for a data store has been added, you can use it to specify a source or a target in a job. See "Specifying Metadata for Sources and Targets" on page 60.

Preparation

Before you use a source designer, the following prerequisites should be met:

• Administrators should have completed the tasks that are described in Chapter 5, "Setup Tasks for Administrators," on page 37.

• If the source will be accessed with library, metadata for the library should have been added to the appropriate metadata repository. This step is the same whether the source is in SAS format or in most other formats. At some sites, administrators might define all libraries and simply tell SAS ETL Studio users which libraries to use. See "Enter Metadata for Libraries" on page 44.

• It is assumed that you are working under change-management control, as described in "Working with Change Management" on page 64.

Note

You do not need to check out a library to add metadata about tables in that library.

Task Summary

Follow these steps to generate metadata for one or more tables or external files that exist in physical storage:

1. From the SAS ETL Studio desktop, select Tools Source Designer from the menu bar. The Source Designer selection window displays.

   The Source Designer selection window displays a number of specific data formats that have been licensed for your site. The specific format often gives better results than the generic format, which has not been optimized for particular kinds of data. Use the format that most closely matches your data whenever possible.

2. From the Source Designer selection window, select the kind of table for which you will generate metadata. A wizard for that kind of table displays.

3. Enter metadata as prompted by the wizard. For details, see the online Help for the wizard.

4. Review the metadata in the last window of the wizard. If the metadata is correct, click the button. The metadata for the table is added to the Project tree.

For an example of how a source designer can be used, see "Example: Using a Source Designer to Enter Metadata for SAS Tables" on page 72. For details about writing your own source designer, see Appendix 2, "Building Java Plug-ins for SAS ETL Studio," on page 189.

Additional Information about Source Designers

The online Help for SAS ETL Studio includes examples for all source designer wizards. To display the relevant Help topics, perform the following steps:

1. From the SAS ETL Studio menu bar, select Help Contents. The online Help window displays.

2. In the left pane of the Help window, select Examples Source Designer Examples.

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