External Procedures and External Procedure Transformations
External Procedures and External Procedure Transformations
There are two components to TX:
external procedures
and
External Procedure transformations
.
An
external procedure
exists separately from the Integration Service. It consists of C, C++, or Visual Basic code written by a user to define a transformation. This code is compiled and linked into a DLL or shared library, which is loaded by the Integration Service at runtime. An external procedure is “bound” to an External Procedure transformation.
An
External Procedure transformation
is created in the Designer. It is an object that resides in the Informatica repository and serves several purposes:
It contains the metadata describing the following external procedure. It is through this metadata that the Integration Service knows the “signature” (number and types of parameters, type of return value, if any) of the external procedure.
It allows an external procedure to be referenced in a mapping. By adding an instance of an External Procedure transformation to a mapping, you call the external procedure bound to that transformation.
You can create a connected or unconnected External Procedure.
When you develop Informatica external procedures, the External Procedure transformation provides the information required to generate Informatica external procedure stubs.