Your First Data Flow

When you first launch Tweakstreet, a workbench window opens. We’re going to create a data flow that processes some records.

Creating the Data flow

Right click anywhere on the canvas and select to create a new data flow. You can also use the application menu and select File > New…

This will open a new empty data flow document.

Adding Steps

Right click on any free space in the data flow document and add a Generate Rows step, then add a Dummy step, and connect the steps.

You can connect the steps in one of two ways:

• Right click the first step, select Connect from the menu, then click on the second step.
• Press and hold the Shift key on your keyboard. Left click on the first step, and keeping the mouse button down drag a connection line from your first step to your second step. Let the mouse button go when the connection line snaps to the correct step.

Running the Flow

Right click on empty space and select Run… from the context menu.

The run dialog allows you to customize parameters, log level, memory usage and data tracking of the flow execution.

Click the Run button. Tweakflow is going to ask to you save the flow, and will then run the flow from disk.

Viewing Data

Running the flow will open a seperate run document. In the run document, you can see data passing between steps by selecting the hops the data is passing through.

Configuring Steps

Close the flow execution document, and go back to your data flow. Double click the Generate Rows step to edit its configuration. Let’s change the number of generated rows to 5.

Confirm the dialog and run again. The step will produce only 5 output rows.

Adding Output Fields

Let’s add another ouput field containing the string Hello World!

Close the run document, go back to your data flow, and open the step configuration again. This time, interact with the output fields by right-clicking a field’s index column to add another output field below it.

Add a new string field, and right click the value widget to morph it into a string widget. All value widgets can be morphed to various input forms. All widgets generate a value - like a number, string, date, etc.

The variety of available widgets makes data entry easier for certain cases. For example: the string widget supports simple strings, but the text widget allows entering multi-line strings.

Enter Hello World! into the string widget.

Confirm the dialog, and run the flow again to see the results.

There should be another field in the output containing our greeting.

Congratulations, you’ve completed your first data flow!

You’re ready to dive into step and expression concepts.