If you are currently using Talend Open Studio (TOS), or Talend’s Enterprise Studio, you have already been able to leverage the many benefits of the out of the box Talend components and connectors. These components and connectors help accelerate the development of your ETL/ELT data pipelines. Currently, the Talend Enterprise Studio version has over 1000+ components and connectors and where TOS has about roughly 850 components and connectors in which can be used. For a full list of all the available components and connectors, click on the Talend components and connectors URL below.
As Pingahla has worked with many customers using both TOS or Talend’s Enterprise Studio, we sometimes run into an issue where a connector or component is not available. Now the great benefits for Talend are if there are no connectors or components available, there are many ways around this, such as connecting by API, using ODBC, or JDBC, etc. But before going down this rabbit hole, I ask you to check out Exchange.Talend.com as you may be able to find an available connector created by the Talend Community.
As some of you may or may not know, Talend was once and still is an open-source solution. Talend has a HUGE community that helps build new components or connectors. In this blog posting, I will provide some instructions on how you can download and use any of the available components or connectors from the Talend’s Exchange place or other Talend forums.
Step 1: First you will need to have TOS or Talend Enterprise Studio version installed. In this blog posting, we will be sharing screenshots in using Talend's Data Fabric Studio version 7.1.1. The following steps would work with TOS or any of the other Talend Enterprise Studio versions, including the latest 7.2.1.
Step 2: Open your TOS or Talend Enterprise Studio on your machine.
Step 3: As you open Talend Studio, you will be asked to select a connection, an existing project, etc. In this example within this instructional blog, we will select the default Local connection and Local Project. It does not matter which you select, as long as you open Talend Studio.
Step 4: Your Talend Studio should have successfully opened. You may have a pop up that appears to download some latest updates or sign up/sign into Talend Community. You can close out those windows.
Step 5: Navigate to the top-left toolbar within Talend Studio and click on the "Window" option. From there you will need to select the "Preferences" option.
Steps 6: Once completing step 5, your Talend Studio Preferences window will pop up. Navigate to the "Talend" option.
Step 7: Next you will need to navigate outside of Talend Studio, and create a new folder where you will store and save the custom Talend components and connectors. In this example, we are creating a folder in the following folder and Subfolder (Talend\tlnd_custom) within the C drive on a Windows machine.
Step 8: Once you have created a folder to store and save your custom Talend components and connectors, you will need to navigate back to Talend Studio and update the "Temporary files" path with the new folder directory in the Preferences/Talend/Temporary files section. Once completed click, "OK."
Steps 1-8 will allow you to start enabling and use custom Talend components and connectors that you are able to obtain Talend’s Exchange place or other Talend forums. The following steps below will walk you through in setting up the custom Sharepoint connector (tSharepointFile) created by knowledgerelay.com.
Once you have completed Steps 1-8, you will need to download a custom Talend component and connector.
Step 9: In this step, we will download the FREE tSharepointFile component from knowledgerelay.com from Talend’s Exchange place. Please note, you will need to create a FREE user account on Talend's Exchange place if you do not have one already. Make sure you save your custom Talend component or connector file in the new folder you created on Step 8.
Step 10: Once you have downloaded your custom Talend component or connector you will need to unzip the zipped file. In this example, we have downloaded the zipped tSharepointFile folder in our C:\Talend\tlnd_custom folder and we will use 7-Zip to unzip and place all the zipped files into a new unzipped folder named, "tSharepointFile."
Step 11: Once you have successfully unzipped the custom Talend component or connector folder, you can delete the zipped download file. In this example, we are deleting the tSharepointfile.zip.
Step 12: Restart your Talend Studio, your new Talend component or connector should appear within the Talend Palette.
Note: If you do not see your new Talend component or connector, this could be the XML file of the custom Talend component or connector is not well configured. Please follow the optional steps below, or if you want to modify where you custom Talend component or connector resides in the Talend Palette, you can also use the optional steps below.
Step 13: Locate the custom Talend component or connector XML document. This should be the only XML document file within the custom Talend component or connector folder. In this example, we will be reviewing the tSharepoinFile_java.xml file.
Step 14: Open the XML custom Talend component or connector file. It is recommended to use Notepad++ or Notepad. In this example, we will open the tSharepoinFile_java.xml file with Notepad.
Step 15: Once you have opened the custom Talend component or connector XML file, search for the following XML tag, "<FAMILIES>." If you cannot find the following tag, this could be the reason why the custom Talend component or connector is not appearing and showing up as an option in Talend Studio.
Step 16: Under the </HEADER> and above the <DOCUMENTATION> tag add and SAVE the following statement;
<FAMILIES>
<FAMILY>File/Management<FAMILY>
</FAMILIES>
The following statement will add the tSharepointFile as a component to Talend Studio Palette. It also stored the tSharepoinFile under the File/Management sub-sections.
Note: You can also modify and change existing custom Talend component or connector locations by updating the FAMILY path.
Step 17: Restart your Talend Studio, your new Talend component or connector should appear within the Talend Palette.
Hopefully, you enjoyed the technical and instructional blog posting. Please leave a comment for any additional feedback or questions. Also, if you are interested in learning more about Pingahla's Talend services, please contact sales@pingahla.com.