Navigation:  Beginner Phase > Creating a Project >

What are all the folders for?

When you first create a project, you will notice that there are lots of folders created. For the more sensitive amongst us, all these folders can be a bit intimidating or bewildering. You can do one of two things at this point

 

Ignore them completely - you won't need to bother with these until you are an intermediate user.
Largely Ignore them for now - but here is a quick taster. The folders are used for sharing things you define in your Project. By default, things you create within Clover such as Connections and Metadata (will become clear what these are later on) are "Internal" to the transformation graph you are working on. If you create another Graph, you will need to define new Connections or Metadata all over again. However, you can share these definitions by "Externalizing" them. This sharing or externalizing simply places the definitions as files in the various folders so they can be accessed by any other graphs. Each folder contains a definition of a specific type so they are nicely organized. End of mystery hopefully.

 

The one folder I like to start using for new projects, however, is the "data-in" folder. I just dump test or real data in here so I know where it is all located. "data-out" I also use to write my output data, especially when testing text output files. These are not needed of you are working with databases but most of the examples in the QSG use disk based data files.