In the following example, you will perform a few preparation steps on your data, create versions at two different moments, and see how you can switch between your versions, as well as switch back to the current state of your preparation.
The dataset used here contains customer data such as their names, occupation, phone number and email address, but that requires some cleansing. Formatting inconsistencies can be found in the columns containing the customers names, such as leading or trailing whitespaces, and inconsistent case. In addition, various phone and email entries are invalid.
As you progress in your preparation, you are going to create two versions, that reflect the state of your preparation at two different times.
Procedure
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Apply the Remove trailing and leading characters and the
Change to title case functions to remove whitespaces and
harmonize the case.
Removing those formatting errors marks the first big step in your preparation, and you are going to create a version to track these changes.
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Click the Manage versions button located in the header
bar.
The Functions panel is replaced with the Versions panel. This panel is empty since no versions exist for this preparation yet.
Adding new versions via the Manage versions button is only available to Talend Data Preparation user with administrator rights. Other users are only able to consult existing version in read-only mode.
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Enter a quick description of the version in the corresponding field,
Fixing formatting errors in names in this example,
and click Add version.
The version is now listed in the Versions panel with a timestamp, and the description you added before.
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From the Functions panel, select the Delete
these filtered rows functions.
All the invalid values have been removed from your dataset, and you are going to create another version to capture this state.
-
Repeat steps 3 to 5 to create a
new version, but this time, enter Removing all invalid
values as description.
Your two versions are now listed in the Versions panel and can be accessed in read-only mode.
Results
You have created two versions of your preparation, in order to capture its state at two different steps of the cleansing process. You can choose to export one of these versions, use it in a Talend Job, or continue to edit the current state of your preparation.