Getting Started with Ferrite
This tutorial explains the basics of getting started with Ferrite:
- Creating a project.
- Creating a File Processor Workflow (pipeline).
- Selecting one or more files to process.
- Executing the workflow.
Ferrite User Interface
The screenshot below shows the main components of the Ferrite User
Interface.
- The Project Browser area shows the user's projects and the
workflows in each project.
- A Workflow Editor area which is used to open the workflow for
editing or executing it. More than one pipeline may be open
simultaneously, and they will appear as tabs within this area.
- A Message Console which displays informational or error messages,
and also serves to show the output of execution of a pipeline (if the
output is not being saved to a file).
Creating a Project
A Project is a container for related pipelines. The first step in
creating a processing pipeline is to create a project. Select File
-> New from the main menu.
Select "New Project" within the wizard, and click Next.
Enter a name for the project and click Finish to create the project.
The created project appears within the Project Browser area.
Creating a File Processor Workflow
A File Processor workflow is a pipeline with the input data for the
pipeline coming from a text file. Once a File Processor workflow is
created, various filters can be added to it to achieve the desired
transformation.
To create a File Processor workflow, select Create ->File Processor
from the main menu.
Select the project where the pipeline should be created and click
Next.
Enter a descriptive name for the workflow, select the directory where
the workflow-related files are to be created, and click Next. For now,
leave the "View Output" option at its default value: "As Plain Text".
The next page of the wizard is where the file(s) to be processed are
selected. Click "Add Files" to open a file system browser and select
one or more files. If the selected file(s) are encoded in Unicode, or
any of the other encodings, select the appropriate encoding in the
"Use Encoding" table, or leave it the option "Use Platform
Default". Click Finish to complete the Pipeline creation.
Execute the Pipeline
The pipeline is now opened within the Workflow editor where any of the
desired transformations can be applied. At this point, just clicking
the "Run" button results in the contents of the file being streamed
within the console area without any transformations/changes applied.
Summary
In this tutorial, we learned how to
- Create a project
- Create a File Processor Workflow
- Select files for processing
- Execute the pipeline
Once the workflow has been created, we can add various transformation
filters to it. A large number of transformation filters are supported
including:
- Adding left and right margins, headers and footers, line numbers,
and indentation
- Removing blank lines, indentation, trailing whitespaces, lines
matching a regular expression pattern, etc.
- Find/replace regular expression patterns.
- Convert to XML/HTML, convert tabular data to Microsoft Excel's
XML format, etc.
- And much more.
Applying these transformations is simply a matter of selecting them
from the main menu. If these built-in filters do not suit the purpose,
the Field Processor filter can be configured with the desired
transformation rules.
|
