Advanced routing in Pentaho Kettle jobs

In this article we will take a look at how to create some complex routing conditions for a Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) job.

Out-of-the-box Kettle comes already with several easy to use conditional job entries:

In some situations though you might need a bit a bit more flexibility, this is when the JavaScript job entry comes into play:

This one is found in the Scripting folder. The name used in the configuration dialog of this particular step is from my point of view better actually better suited: Evaluating JavaScript.

We will look at a very trivial example:

In this job flow we only want to execute the Write To Log Sunday job entry if the day of the week is a Sunday. On all other days we want to execute the job entry Write to Log.

The Evaluating JavaScript job entry is configured as shown in the screenshot below:

Note that you can write multiple lines of code, but you must make sure that the return value is a boolean value!

In case you want to create this example yourself, please find below the JavaScript code:

var d = new Date();

var dof = d.getDay();

dof == 6 ? true : false;

Running this ETL process on a Wednesday will show the following in the log:

As you see it is rather simple creating more complex conditions and the bonus is that you can make use of a scripting language which you probably already know: JavaScript.

More information about this job entry can be found on the Pentaho Wiki.

You can download the sample job file from here. This file was created in PDI 4.4 stable, which means that you should only open it in PDI 4.4 or newer.