Programming Components

There are different types of programming components used within server jobs. They fall within three broad categories:

• Built-in. IBM® InfoSphere® DataStage® comes with several built-in programming components that you can reuse within your server jobs as required. Some of the built-in components are accessible from the repository, and you can copy code from these. Others are only accessible from the Expression Editor, and the underlying code is not visible.
• Custom. You can also define your own programming components using the Designer client, specifically routines (see Working with Routines) and custom transforms (see Defining Custom Transforms). These are stored in the repository and can be reused for other jobs and by other InfoSphere DataStage users.
• External. You can use certain types of external component from within InfoSphere DataStage. If you have a large investment in custom UniVerse functions or ActiveX (OLE) functions, then it is possible to call these from within InfoSphere DataStage. This is done by defining a wrapper routine which in turn calls the external functions. Note that the mechanism for including custom UniVerse functions is different from including ActiveX (OLE) functions.

The following sections discuss programming terms you will come across when programming server jobs.