Introduction

In this chapter, we will perform fairly simple tasks for performing basic operations on context variables, but do not take this as a reflection of the unimportance of context variables.

The use of context variables is a fundamental requirement for creating production quality Talend applications. Appendix B, Management of Contexts, deals with some of the implications of the different methods of managing context variables within a project.

Transportable code

For code to be of production quality, it must be transportable between environments. This means that, when we move code from the development environment to the test environment, it should execute properly even if we are using different file paths, file names, database names, database user IDs, and so on.

Context variables

Context variables are parameters that Talend uses, that can be set to different values in different environments.

Assuming that the Talend code has been built to use these parameters and they have been set correctly...