Using Target Designers

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Overview of Target Designers

SAS ETL Studio provides at least two target designer wizards: the Target Table Designer and the Cube Designer. The Cube Designer enables you to add or update cubes. For details about that wizard, see Chapter 11, "Creating Cubes," on page 161.

The Target Table Designer enables you to enter metadata for a single table that does not exist in physical storage. For example, you could use the Target Table Designer to specify metadata for the following kinds of tables:

• A table that does not yet exist, but will be created when a SAS ETL Studio job is executed.

• A table that reuses column metadata that has been saved to the current repository.

• A complex table, such as a star schema for a data mart.

The ability to specify metadata for an object that will be created in the future makes a target designer a convenient tool for specifying the metadata for a target in a SAS ETL Studio job. However, a target designer wizard is not limited to generating the metadata for a target in a job. After the metadata for a table or a cube has been added, it can be used 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 target 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 table will stored in library, metadata for the library should have been added to the appropriate metadata repository. This step is the same whether the data store 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 a single table that does not yet exist in physical storage:

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

2. From the Target Designer selection window, select Target Table.

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 target designer can be used, see "Example: Using the Target Table Designer to Enter Metadata for a SAS Table" on page 89. For details about writing your own target designer, see Appendix 2, "Building Java Plug-ins for SAS ETL Studio," on page 189.

Additional Information about Target Designers

The online Help for SAS ETL Studio includes examples for the target 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 Target Designer Examples.

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