Sharing Definitions: Metadata, Connections, Sequences, Parameters & Lookups |
When you create Connections, Metadata, Sequences, Parameter Files and Lookups they are local to the graph within which they were defined. You may want this but you will soon come across the situation where you do not want to recreate things that were already created.
Externalizing Your Definitions
The way Clover deals with this is to "externalize" a definition. This basically means that a definition gets stored as a file in a common location that can be accessed by another graph.
The way you do this is to take a definition, for example metadata, then right click on it and select "Externalize". You then specify where to put the file that will be created. This is where the folders within your Eclipse project come into play. The following folder are automatically created as a part of a Clover Project:
• | conn - connections |
• | lookup - lookups |
• | meta - metadata |
• | seq - sequences |
• | root folder - this is where parameter files typically are put |
When you externalize, Clover will automatically change the Edge metadata to point to the newly created file instead of the internal definition. If, in the case of metadata, you look at the internal metadata definition, you will see that it now says something like "/meta/customers.fmt" rather than just "customers".
As usual, the best way to get this across is to look at the video.