PLEASE NOTE: This documentation applies to an earlier version. For the most recent documentation, visit the Pentaho Enterprise Edition documentation site.

Description

The Select Values step is useful for selecting, removing, renaming, changing data types and configuring the length and precision of the fields on the stream. These operations are organized into different categories:

Select and Alter — Specify the exact order and name in which the fields have to be placed in the output rows
Remove — Specify the fields that have to be removed from the output rows
Meta-data - Change the name, type, length and precision (the metadata) of one or more fields

An example of a transformation that includes this step is located at samples/transformations/Select values - some variants.ktr and samples/transformations/Select Values - copy field values to new fields.ktr

Options

Select & Alter tab

This tab contains options for selecting and changing data types and fields. The Get Fields to Select button will retrieve available fields based on the existing input steps and populate the entries in this tab.

Option	Description
Step Name	Name of the step. Note: This name has to be unique in a single transformation.
Fieldname	The name of the field from the input stream
Rename to	The new name of the field. Leave blank if you do not wish to rename the field
Length	Specify this value if you want to implicitly select all other fields from the input stream(s) that are not explicitly selected in the Fields section.
Precision	The precision option depends on the field type, but only Number is supported; it returns the number of floating point digits
Include unspecified fields, ordered by name	Enable if you want to implicitly select all other fields from the input stream(s) that are not explicitly selected in the Fields section

Edit Mapping

The Edit Mapping dialog allows you to easily define multiple mappings between source and target fields.

Note: Edit Mapping will only work if there is only one target output step.

Option	Description
Source fields	A list of input fields available to map. Select a field to begin mapping
Target fields	A list of fields that source fields can be mapped to. Once you have selected a source field, select a target field to create a mapping
Add	Adds a source and target field mapping pair to the Mappings section
Delete	Removes a selected Mappings entry

Remove tab

This tab allows you to remove fields from the input stream. Click Get fields to remove to import fields from previous steps.

Note: Field removals can slow down the process since the field order gets internally changed.

Meta-data tab

Options under this tab allow you to rename input fields, convert them to different data types, and alter their length, and precision. Click Get fields to change to import fields from previous steps.

Option	Description
Fieldname	The name of the imported field. Note: If you renamed a field in the Select & Alter tab, the name here must match the renamed value.
Rename to	If you want to rename this field, this is where you put the new name
Type	The data type for this field
Length	The field length NB: setting the field length will not truncate existing strings (use the Strings Cut step)
Precision	The precision option depends on the field type, but only Number is supported; it returns the number of floating point digits
Binary to Normal?	Converts a string to a numeric data type, when appropriate
Format	The format mask (number type or date format)
Date Format Lenient?	Determines whether the date parser is strict or lenient. Leniency means that invalid date values are processed. If set to N, only strictly valid date values will be accepted; if set to Y, the parser will attempt to determine the intention of an incorrect date, if possible, and correct it.
Date Locale	Specifies the date locale to use for date conversions and calculations. Leave blank to use the default encoding on your system or chose from the populated this list accordingly.
Date Time Zone	Specifies the date time zone to use for date conversions and calculations. Leave blank to use the default encoding on your system or chose from the populated list accordingly.
Lenient number conversion	When this option is set to Y, numbers get parsed until it finds a non-numeric value (e.g. a dash or slash) and stops parsing without reporting an error. When set to N, numbers get parsed strictly throwing an error in case invalid numbers are in the input. The default behavior is set to N and can be changed by setting the KETTLE_LENIENT_STRING_TO_NUMBER_CONVERSION variable to Y.
Encoding	Specifies the text file encoding to use. Leave blank to use the default encoding on your system. To use Unicode, specify UTF-8 or UTF-16. On first use, Spoon searches your system for available encodings and populates this list accordingly.
Decimal	A decimal point; this is either a dot or a comma
Grouping	A method of separating units of thousands in numbers of four digits or larger. This is either a dot or a comma.
Currency	Symbol used to represent currencies

Metadata Injection Support

All fields of this step support metadata injection. You can use this step with ETL Metadata Injection to pass metadata to your transformation at runtime.