5.x Design Studio Overview¶

Jitterbit delivers powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use data and application integration software. Designed for the technical business analyst, Jitterbit allows companies of all sizes to solve the challenges of application, data, and business process integration between on-premises and Cloud systems. Jitterbit's graphical "No-Coding" approach accelerates and simplifies the configuration and management of on-premises and cloud integration projects. Jitterbit provides an easy, effective, and inexpensive way of integrating data, applications, and even devices across the three technologies that make up modern enterprise IT architectures:

Traditional on-premises systems including traditional databases, packaged enterprise applications from industry vendors SAP, Microsoft and Oracle, and custom-built applications.
Cloud services including Salesforce.com, Workday and Amazon.
Social and Mobile services including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Android and Apple.

Jitterbit is designed to allow these integrations to be created and managed not just by the system developers, but also by the analysts who understand the business processes that use the data.

Jitterbit helps you meet the three biggest challenges of data management today:

Data integration – replication, bidirectional movement, synchronization.
Business Process Integration – applying logic to orchestrated business processes as they're executed.
Mash-ups – complex processes, real-time integration at the user interface.

Jitterbit supports both real-time and batch integration.

It's all done in three easy stages – Design, Deploy and Manage.

Design¶

You design your data-integration processes in a graphical interface created for business users. Because the design steps are wizard-driven – implemented with mouse clicks, not code programming – your company's administrators should be able to design an integration with little or no help from professional developers. The wizards walk you through the steps of building designs, mappings, connectivity and transformations.

In the Design phase, you can test a query or other operation to make sure all components are valid. Or you can actually run the operation, which displays an operations monitor at the bottom of your screen to report start/end times and progress, number of records processed, and success or failure.

Deploy¶

Deploy to an Environment in the Cloud. Every element you create in Jitterbit is defined in a project. The project is deployed to an Environment to be stored, and is then managed by the Management Console.

Jitterbit offers parallel processing and the ability to chunk out your data and to support high-volume APIs, moving millions of records in a matter of minutes.

Jitterbit features a real-time Activities process monitor with proactive alerts in the Management Console.

Manage¶

You manage your operation in real-time in Jitterbit's Management Console. You can quickly determine whether your operations have run successfully in the Activities Console.

The Activities Console allows you to determine the processes that have run successfully, if errors occurred, and the type of error.
The start and end times display for operations that completed successfully.
You can pinpoint the source of problems for easy correction by viewing logs in the Activities Console online or securely behind your corporate firewall.

About the Jitterbit Studio¶

The Jitterbit Studio is entirely wizard-driven, taking you step by step through the creation of data mappings, connectivity and transformations. The Studio features automatic data mapping and enterprise connectors to make connectivity as easy as possible.

Complex data models are supported including Salesforce.com and dynamic schemas, as well as connecting to SOAP API, REST API and Cloud-based APIs such as the Salesforce Bulk API.

Defining Processes

Beyond the wizard capabilities, Jitterbit offers several tools for easy definition of complex business processes such as "lead to cash" or customer/product synchronization across multiple systems. Thus you can orchestrate the handling of data throughout a process or chain of operations.

Formula Builder. This feature allows you to pinpoint the addition of logic to your transformations with a user-friendly graphical interface that you can switch between Analyst and Developer modes.
Comprehensive logic library. Well over 100 predefined Formula Builder functions are available in the Jitterbit Studio.
Enhanced scripting. You don't have to code logic in the tool; but if you do insert a script, Jitterbit provides tools to validate it.
Operation Chains. In Jitterbit, you can chain your operations to be sequentially triggered by events in a prior operation. Graphical representation in the Activity Console shows you how elements in a chain are subordinated, and lets you easily pinpoint the source of any problems in operation.
Local variables. You can create local variables (as opposed to global variables) that run only in real-time operation of a specific process and are not visible to other operations.

A Modular Approach to Definitions¶

Jitterbit is flexible and modular, letting you control potentially hundreds or thousands of different data transformations with a single definition. As an example, you may have 100 different files that must be transformed and sent to a fulfillment house on a weekly basis. Some of the files may be text files; other information may be stored in databases or XML files. Regardless of the file type, you need to have all 100 files transformed every Friday at 5:00pm.

With Jitterbit, you only need to define a single schedule called "End of Week" that specifies Friday, 5:00pm. This single schedule can then be used to time when all 100 files are transformed, rather than having to define this scheduling information separately for each of the 100 files. If it becomes necessary to send the files at 6:00pm on Thursday instead of the original 5:00pm Friday, simply change the day and time fields in the "End of Week" schedule definition. Save your changes to this schedule, and the 100 files that reference it will immediately be updated to reflect the new time.

Jitterbit supports all of the REST APIs, making it as easy to connect with the newer types of endpoints as with traditional endpoints. Social networking, one of the newer endpoint types, enables you to integrate social collaboration with business processes and keep in touch with colleagues and customers in the ways your customers keep in touch among themselves.

Operations: Leverage the Modular Power of Jitterbit's Definitions¶

The key to how each different data transformation is configured and controlled is through an operation. An operation is simply a specific collection of different definitions that are grouped together to define a particular data transformation. Each definition within the operation provides a unique detail, such as where the information is, where the information should go, how it should be transformed and when it should happen.

Each operation specifies a unique data transformation process: if you need to perform the transformations at different times, you can create different operations that reference different schedules. If you need to access some information in a database, but read other data from an XML file, you can create two different operations. But what makes Jitterbit so powerful and easy to use is your ability to quickly build and/or modify all the operations you need simply by referencing their common aspects.

As in the schedule example described above, you would have created a number of different operations--some referencing text files, others pointing to XML documents, and at least one referencing your database--yet each operation references the same "End of Week" schedule.

Types of Definitions¶

The following modular definitions are referenced within an operation. The Steps to Data Transformation below will introduce you to many of these:

Sources: Identifies where the source data is stored (on an FTP server, in a File Share directory, in a database, etc.).
Targets: Identifies where the transformed data will be sent (to a different FTP location, in a File Share directory, in a database, etc.).
Transformations: Describes the source and target structures and how the data is to be transformed. Supported structures include text documents, XML defined by a Schema/DTD, SOAP requests/responses, REST requests/responses, database relations and LDAP.
Web Service Methods: Lets you transform your data before sending it to a Web Service request, then also transform the Web Service response data into another format.
Scripts: Allows you to run and re-use Jitterbit scripts at many positions in the operation chain.
File Formats: Defines text document structures. Currently, delimited and fixed field flat and hierarchical file formats are supported.
Hosted HTTP Endpoints: Allows you to define URLs that serve as an entry point to one or more operations. This allows you to handle requests in real-time through HTTP requests.
Schedules: Defines the date, time and frequency when the operation should run.
Email Messages: Allows success and failure notifications to be sent when an operation completes.
Operations: Allows you to combine all the above mentioned definitions in flexible ways.

Steps to Data Transformation¶

Here is a brief summary of the steps you will typically take to define and run your data transformations using Jitterbit.

We recommend you work in the following order:

Create an Environment
Create Roles and add Members
Assign Roles and Access Rights to an Environment
Define a New Project
Create an Operation in your project and define all of its supporting components, including:
- Source
- Target
- Transformation
Deploy the Completed Operation to an Environment and Run It
Check Activities Console for Results