The User-Defined Process (UDP) enables you to include a third-party program as a branch or a process in a Quality project. For example, you might create an awk script to perform a transformation (using regular expressions and other custom logic) that cannot be performed by the Transformer. The difference between a branch and a process is how the output is handled. The output of a branch is a standalone file. The output of a process is used as the input for the next process in the project.
Guidelines
Note the following guidelines:
- The third-party programs (scripts and executables) are created outside of Trillium, but must be stored in a designated directory.
- The User-Defined Processes (UDPs) are not deployable to real-time processing.
- Within the Control Center, Quality projects work with fixed-length UCS2 data. Be sure the third-party process you want to use can handle data of this type.
- Your output file must be set up as expected by the schema defined for the next process in your project. If necessary, you can use the schema editor to modify the output or input schema to have only the required fields.
Note: User-Defined Processes (UDPs) work only with uncompressed input and output data.
Therefore, if you minimize disk space in a Quality project that contains one or more
UDPs, the output of the process preceding the UDP and the output from the UDP will be
uncompressed. All other intermediate files in the project remain compressed.