Using the Data Browser

You can browse the data associated with the input or output links of any server job built-in passive stage or with the links to certain parallel job stages

The Data Browser is invoked by clicking the View Data... button from a stage Inputs or Outputs page, or by choosing the View link Data... option from the shortcut menu.

For parallel job stages a supplementary dialog box lets you select a subset of data to view by specifying the following:

• Rows to display. Specify the number of rows of data you want the data browser to display.
• Skip count. Skip the specified number of rows before viewing data.
• Period. Display every Pth record where P is the period. You can start after records have been skipped by using the Skip property. P must equal or be greater than 1.

If your administrator has enabled the Generated OSH Visible option in the IBM® InfoSphere® DataStage® Administrator, the supplementary dialog box also has a Show OSH button. Click this to open a window showing the OSH that will be run to generate the data view. It is intended for expert users.

The Data Browser displays a grid of rows in a window. If a field contains a linefeed character, the field is shown in bold, and you can, if required, resize the grid to view the whole field.

The Data Browser window appears.

The Data Browser uses the metadata defined for that link. If there is insufficient data associated with a link to allow browsing, the View Data... button and shortcut menu command used to invoke the Data Browser are disabled. If the Data Browser requires you to input some parameters before it can determine what data to display, the Job Run Options dialog box appears and collects the parameters (see "The Job Run Options Dialog Box").

The Data Browser grid has the following controls:

• You can select any row or column, or any cell within a row or column, and press CTRL-C to copy it.
• You can select the whole of a very wide row by selecting the first cell and then pressing SHIFT+END.
• If a cell contains multiple lines, you can expand it by left-clicking while holding down the SHIFT key. Repeat this to shrink it again.

You can view a row containing a specific data item using the Find... button. The Find dialog box will reposition the view to the row containing the data you are interested in. The search is started from the current row.

The Display... button invokes the Column Display dialog box. This allows you to simplify the data displayed by the Data Browser by choosing to hide some of the columns. For server jobs, it also allows you to normalize multivalued data to provide a 1NF view in the Data Browser.

This dialog box lists all the columns in the display, all of which are initially selected. To hide a column, clear it.

For server jobs, the Normalize on drop-down list box allows you to select an association or an unassociated multivalued column on which to normalize the data. The default is Un-normalized, and choosing Un-normalized will display the data in NF² form with each row shown on a single line. Alternatively you can select Un-Normalized (formatted), which displays multivalued rows split over several lines.

In the example, the Data Browser would display all columns except STARTDATE. The view would be normalized on the association PRICES.