Passing a value from a parent Job to a child Job

Passing a value from the parent Job to the child Job is a common real world requirement. This article serves as a best practice guide.

In this example, you read data from a text file in a parent Job and pass fields from each row to the child Job. The data is used in the child Job.

Create and configure the parent Job

You have created a text file, in this example in.text.

id;name;scope
1;Shong;98
2;Ross;90
3;Tom;55
4;Patrick;99
5;Pedro;90

Create a Standard Job called ParentJob and configure it as follows.
Double-click the tFileInputDelimited to open its Basic settings view and then configure its parameters.
- Click the [...] button next to the File Name/Stream field and browse to the source file, in this example in.txt.
- Set Header to 1.
- Click the Edit schema button and add three columns to the schema, id as Integer, name as String and scope as Integer.
In the Basic settings of the tFlowToIterate, make sure that the Use the default (key,value) in global variables. box is checked.
Press Ctrl+S to save your Job.

Create a Standard Job called ChildJob.
Open the Contexts tab to define two context variables, name and scope.

These variables are used to pass a value from the parent Job to the child Job.
Add a tJava component from the Palette to the Job editor and double-click the component to open its Basic settings.

In the Code area, type in the following Java code.

String message="Hello "+context.name+", you get "+context.scope+" points in this exam!";
System.out.println(message);

In the parent Job, open the Basic settings view of the tRunJob component to configure its parameters.
In the Job field, select the child Job, in this example ChildJob.
In the Context Param field, click the [+] button to add the two parameters defined in the Context tab of the child Job, in this example name and scope.
Define the value for each parameter, (String)globalMap.get("row1.name") for name and (Integer)globalMap.get("row1.scope") for scope.
Press Ctrl+S to save your changes.
Press F6 to execute the parent Job, in this example ParentJob.

The following results print to the console.