Goal

The goal of this project is to provide a library that will allow automatic generation and automatic changing of Informatica Powercenter ETL Mappings.

Some of you may have noticed that after creating a handful of Informatica mappings, the process becomes very redundant. You may have also noticed that you're able to accomplish the task with little or no thought. The reason for this is that most mappings follow an existing pattern that you've already learned, and are simply repeating with different inputs.

The goal of this library is to provide the means to start to automate this mundane programming. If you're able to identify a pattern, you'll be able to code the pattern away reducing the cost of creating a mapping from days to minutes.

Another common task is to change an Informatica Mapping. Something as simple as adding a column; can take hours or even days and may even prove error prone for large mappings. This library is able to read an existing Informatica Mapping, convert it into an object tree, allow your code to change it, and then spit it back out.

As the library evolves, it will contain more and more patterns on top of the core automation library. Currently the only pattern included is adding a column to any mapping. If you build a pattern, and think it's reusable, send it to us, and we'll add it to the library.

What about Mapfwk SDK

Some of you maybe asking yourself, well, Informatica already provides a java automation library called mapfwk sdk. If you've used it, you'll understand the need for a new library. The mapfwk sdk is meant only for mapping generation, is quite obtuse, and not very well documented. Once you go beyond the obvious mapping, the SDK becomes extremely difficult to work with requiring, literally, decompiling of code.

Design

The core library consists of domain objects that represent the DTD provided by Informatica. The domain objects are mapped to the XML structure via JIBX. There is additional abstraction coded into the domain objects such as ability to treat target, source and transformation generically. On top of the core library, there are utility classes that codify common patterns, and actions.

The library currently supports Informatica PowerCenter 8.1.1.