Care must be taken regarding map and structure compatibility between the designer and runtime since they may be different releases of Talend Data Mapper. It is possible to use a newer release of the designer than the runtime and therefore create a map that the runtime will not be able to process. If this happens, the runtime will give a clear error message indicating it could not open the map because of a version mismatch. At this point you will need to use a runtime of the same or later release than the designer that produced the map to execute the map.