Schedule for the open source Datastage tool (codename: dsSurfer)

One of the things I have always wished to do was, to work on an Open source project and get to interact with the peers in my domain. Thanks to DSXchange my wish has been partially fulfilled as I get to interact with the best minds working on Datastage. There are quite a lot of reasons why we don't have open source projects in Datastage, I am not going to dive into those details.

The motivation behind this initiative is my wish to make open source projects in Datastage a possiblity. Once I decided that I am going to start an open source initiative, All I had to do was dive into the posts at DSXchange and find out the most common things that Datastage users wanted. My first open-source project is going to be the creation of a few utilities which would help the developers do a few things using "an easy to use GUI". With that said, let's jump into the windows utility which we are going to create. I have given it a codename dsSurfer (it isn't very cool, But I am expecting you guys to help me out with the actual name). Now dsSurfer would be a Windows application (similar to DelimitedFileViewer) which would have a GUI just like any other desktop application and it would work from desktops which have Datastage client components installed on them. And it would broadly do the following mentioned below this para. Please post comments on what *else* you would like to see in this tool and we'll see if we can accomodate them into this release.

• Launch Datastage client components.
• Generate job reports
• Schedule backups of projects
  

Also, I would need a lot of help from the experts at DSXchange in figuring out the best possible way to do these things. I have also planned a schedule for the release dsSurfer.

# Schedule

• 06/18: Post it on the blog
• 06/20: Freeze the requirements and post the final requirements on my blog.
• 06/25: Finish the UI
• 07/05: Finish the coding for req 1 and req 3
• 07/15: Finish the coding for req2
• 07/17: Finish the complete integration and test it on 7.5x2 and 8.x thoroughly.
• 07/18 - 07/20: Alpha testing
• 07/20 - 07/25: Beta testing
• 07/26 - 07/28 : Bug fixing
• 07 /28: Final Release
  

Requirements:
This tool would have the abilities to:

Generate job reports

• It has to have the ability to search jobs and generate reports of jobs selected from the list box.
• If one of the jobs is a sequence, it needs to generate a report listing all the jobs used in the sequence.
• A way to integrate all the reports into one html document?
  

Schedule backups of projects
Options to schedule backups of:

• All projects on a server
• Selected projects from a server
• Optionally zipping the dsx files

Launch Datastage client components

• Store the user id and password associated with a datastage server (Use encryption to store the passwords).
• Launch Designer, Manager, Administrator and the Director.
• Options to store as many server/user combinations as possible.

Technology to be used:

I am going to use C# 2.0 to write all the front end code and may be use the Datastage API to get the information needed from Datastage. Also, I'll be putting up the screenshots, the pieces of code which I come up with, on this blog. And hopefully by 28th July 2008, we will have a cool tool (with a cooler name ;) ) to make life in Datastage easier and more fun.

Please post your valuable comments on the requirements and other stuff.

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Updates on 06/23/2008:

I was expecting a lot of suggestions on dsSurfer :O (I got a couple of suggestions from Amey and Uma Maheshwar) But, I guess I was too overzealous about this whole thing. Since the requirements have not changed, I thought that just updating this post would do.

I'll go ahead with the requirements posted above, Very soon (hopefully ;) ) you guys will get a peek at what's in store for dsSurfer. I'll be posting the screenshots of UI once I am done with it. Hope to recieve your continuos support ;)

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