Revisiting the Spoon interface and the editing features

You already know how to use Spoon for designing and running transformations. As you must have noticed, there are a lot of similarities when it's time to design and create a Job. Let's explain how Spoon looks like when you work with jobs:

Spoon interface

The following table describes the main differences you will notice while designing a Job, as compared to designing a Transformation:

If you click on the View icon in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen, the tree will change to show the structure of the Job currently being edited:

 Viewing the structure of a Job

In the previous chapter, we explained some editing features which are very useful when you design a Transformation. The same features are available when you create a Job, but it's worth explaining some differences that arise:

• Using the mouseover assistance toolbar it is a tiny toolbar that is quite similar to the one you know. In this case, the toolbar appears when you position the mouse cursor over a Job entry. As we don't deal with data but with tasks, the metadata injection option doesn't exist in this case.
• Adding Job entries and creating hops for adding a new job entry to the work area, you can use any of the options you learned for adding a step to a Transformation. In the same way, all the options for creating a hop in a Transformation are also available for creating a hop between two Job entries.
• Working with grids contains the same kind of grids that you have in transformations are also present in some Job entries. The same shortcuts apply in this case.

For a full reference to these options, read the Getting Familiar with Editing Features section in Chapter 2, Getting Started with Transformations.