Outputting PDI's graphical canvas and steps to images.

Dear PDI developers,

I have been thinking and searching for great ways to document
transformations and jobs efficiently and wanted to open a small
discussion about possible solutions.

Use case:
Currently, I try to craft clever screenshots and open the properties
for certain steps that contain pertinent details. Then I take those
screenshots and carefully place them in a document between written
descriptions of what is happening.

The process is slow and updates to documentation are painful.

Ideas for a solution:
1) Add functionality to Spoon to allow the graphical canvas that a
tranformation or job appears on to be saved off to some popular format
like JPG, PNG or TIFF.

2) Taking it one step further, could spoon iterate through each of the
steps and capture a picture of what the entire dialog box looks like
and save them off to a graphic file?

Pictures speak very well, and that is part of the strength of PDI
itself. Afterwards, someone writing documentation could just sift
through the image files and lay them out in a way that tells the story
best.
People conducting training or writing documentation would love this.

What do you think? Would this be a straightforward or daunting task
to undertake? Is this something within the scope of interest and
resources of Pentaho to undertake or something left as an exercise to
the community?

---
Thanks for a great product and all of your creative efforts and time.
As active users, our team enjoys new features, but also are grateful
for the continued focus on stability and perfect performance of minor
details.

Thanks.

Brandon

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Generating JPG, PNG or TIFF is not what Pentaho has in mind.
The first prototype of the Kettle documentation generator already produces PDF, HTML, Word or Excel output.
We should see it pop up somewhere in an enterprise edition in Q2, Q3 at the latest.

Generating the images is already possible in Kettle 4 with a combination of TransPainter and the GCInterface abstraction layer.

Good luck!
Matt
--
Matt Casters <mcasters (AT) pentaho (DOT) org>
Chief Data Integration
Fonteinstraat 70, 9400 OKEGEM - Belgium - Cell : +32 486 97 29 37
Pentaho : The Commercial Open Source Alternative for Business Intelligence

On Tuesday 02 March 2010 18:23:16 Mazeal wrote:
> Dear PDI developers,
>
> I have been thinking and searching for great ways to document
> transformations and jobs efficiently and wanted to open a small
> discussion about possible solutions.
>
> Use case:
> Currently, I try to craft clever screenshots and open the properties
> for certain steps that contain pertinent details. Then I take those
> screenshots and carefully place them in a document between written
> descriptions of what is happening.
>
> The process is slow and updates to documentation are painful.
>
> Ideas for a solution:
> 1) Add functionality to Spoon to allow the graphical canvas that a
> tranformation or job appears on to be saved off to some popular format
> like JPG, PNG or TIFF.
>
> 2) Taking it one step further, could spoon iterate through each of the
> steps and capture a picture of what the entire dialog box looks like
> and save them off to a graphic file?
>
> Pictures speak very well, and that is part of the strength of PDI
> itself. Afterwards, someone writing documentation could just sift
> through the image files and lay them out in a way that tells the story
> best.
> People conducting training or writing documentation would love this.
>
> What do you think? Would this be a straightforward or daunting task
> to undertake? Is this something within the scope of interest and
> resources of Pentaho to undertake or something left as an exercise to
> the community?
>
> ---
> Thanks for a great product and all of your creative efforts and time.
> As active users, our team enjoys new features, but also are grateful
> for the continued focus on stability and perfect performance of minor
> details.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Brandon
>
>

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