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jellerbee's avatar
jellerbee
New Contributor
6 years ago

Struggling to get a basic understanding of key concepts

Thank you for giving me access to the community during my trial.

I hoped it would provide better information than your documentation but so far I haven’t had any luck.

I can’t find definitions or explanations of several obviously important concepts and relationships. “Document”, “View”, and “Expression” are a three in particular I am struggling to grasp. They aren’t defined in the glossary or anywhere else that I can find but they are obviously important since these terms are referenced in virtually every page on individual snaps and pipelines. I can get some fuzzy approximation of how these items are related and work but nothing definite.

Is there a single topic anywhere in your documentation that goes over exactly how data flows from the start of a pipeline through to the end and answers some basic questions like: How is data sent from one snap to another? Is it always sent as a document? What is the difference between a Document and a JSON object? What is the relationship between a document and a view? What exactly is a view? Why should I care about them? What does it mean for a snap to have multiple views? What is the relationship between a Document and Expressions? I can’t find definitions or explanations of any of these things anywhere in your docs.

thanks, Jeff

Learning & Resources

3 Replies

  • Supratim's avatar
    Supratim
    Contributor III
    6 years ago

    @jellerbee

    1. If you connect one snap with another data will automatically pass.
    2. Document is nothing but Json object, snaplogic platform internally convert it’s input as json.Let say you connect SFDC, you can see the output of this snap as json format.
    3. Document view means round shape, like mapper snap you can found both input and output views are round shape by default. For diamond shape you can refer file writer snap, which is called binary view.
    4. Expression is nothing but snaplogic scripting language like java scrpit. For and example if you want current date-time , you can use Date.now().

    For very basic can go through https://www.snaplogic.com/community-videos/01_Introduction_to_SnapLogic_Enterprise_Integration_Cloud_and_the_Designer.mp4

    • akidave's avatar
      akidave
      Employee
      5 years ago

      Just to clarify that, JSON is the default serialization format used by SnapLogic when data has to be serialized on the wire (for passing data across nodes) or for display to the user. For a regular pipeline execution, say data read from an XML file, with some transformation and then converted to CSV, there is no JSON involved. Documents are the data records/tuples/rows which flow between snaps, there is no JSON involved in that data flow unless data serialization is required.