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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7 comments:
I am very happy to see this post becuase you are working hard to make other datastage developers life easy.I have one suggestion if you include running datastage jobs from that GUI by passing the parameters to that job.It will help very much if possible for you
That is a good idea uma maheswar.
It wouldn't be too hard to add this functionality into dsSurfer. But, I am trying to add things which are *not* provided by IBM out of the box. Anyway, this would be a good little addition to the functionality.
Hi,how is your work going.Are you adding Run job functionality to your requirements or not.If you need any help please post it in the blog.I will try to help you as much as i can
Thanks
Uma
I am sorry if I am late. I would like to share another idea that I have been contemplating for a long time now. I wanted a tool to be able to write and delete rows from a dataset. This is not done at the moment by orchadmin, but it would be a really nice feature. It will be particularly helpful when we try to test intermediate jobs with dataset as source and we need to test jobs with different test rows.
Hello there...
I'm a DS Developer from Brasil at a company that have a branch in your country.
I am too willing to develop some opensource tools for DS. Don't you think programming this stuff in java would be better to port the solutions other platforms ?
In case you want to discuss about this, please feel free to contact me. Would really like to engage in an opensource project on DS.
My e-mail: gorni.henrique at gmail.com
I apologize for slipping on the schedule. I was out on an unplanned vacation and so, didn't have much time to work on this app.
@mahesh
I'll try to add that functionality to dsSurfer.
@t rex
You've got a great idea there, And I agree that it would be very helpful for all of us if there was some kind of functionality to edit the data in datasets. The unfortunate thing is that the data in datasets is stored in the datastage internal format (I don't know if this is published by IBM), So reading the data directly and doing some conversion is out of the picture. The only option as far as I can think, to make datasets "editable" is to read them using orchadmin and then save the changes back into the dataset by using an orchestrate script. This would be a bit complex, Maybe we can take up in the next release of dsSurfer or come up with a new utility for that :D Thanks for your suggestion !
@Henrique
You are right that developing it in Java would make it more independent of the platform. I chose .Net just because it's easier to develop (for me) in it, also that the datastage clients as of now can be installed only on Windows machines.
I'll post the screenshots shortly and if any of you guys are willing to improve them or want to develop the code for this you are Welcome :D
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