Repository Metadata
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Salesforce Repository Metadata
The Talend Studio Repository allows you to store metadata about the various data sources that you may connect to. This is a great development aid, and allows you to explore many aspects of your data sources. Talend allows you to use these data sources in your Jobs, by dragging an object from the repository to the design canvas.
Although using repository objects directly in your Job is convenient to do, this often means that you have connection parameters in your Jobs that have been provided by the repository. This makes things troublesome when you want to promote your Job through to Test and Production; where these connection parameters will change. My preference is to always provide connection parameters using Context Groups, and to externalise the values. I achieve this by using a reusable Subjob and I have described one in the article LibContextReader.
Creating a Salesforce Repository Connection
To establish a Salesforce connection in the Talend Repository, navigate, to Talend Studio->Repository->Metadata->Salesforce and then right-click with your mouse, to activate the context-sensitive menu. Now select Create Salesforce Connection, as shown in the screenshot below.
You may be requested to install Third Party Libraries (Older versions of Talend come with all required libraries pre-installed). Install these libraries as needed, by following the on-screen instructions. You will need an Internet connection to download these modules.
Enter a Name for your connection and, optionally, a Purpose and Description. Press Next when completed.
Now enter the connection parameters for your Salesforce account. In this example, I'm using a free Developer Force account. For more information on Salesforce connection parameters, read our article on Getting Started with Salesforce. Remember that the Password field is your Salesforce password and Security Token, concatenated.
Retrieving Salesforce Repository Information
You can now retrieve Salesforce Schema objects, by navigating to Talend Studio->Repository->Metadata->Salesforce->MySandbox and selecting Retrieve Salesforce Modules from the context-sensitive menu.
You should now see all of the available Salesforce Modules displayed. You can now select the ones that you want to import. In the following screen shot, Account has been selected for import. When you have selected the desired objects, press Finish.
Exploring your Salesforce Repository
You can now expand MySandbox in the repository browser, to reveal the Account object. This, in turn, can then be expanded, to reveal the objects Schema, as shown in the screenshot below.
You can double-click the Schema, to both view and edit the details in the repository.
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