You saw through the exercises how powerful the JavaScript step is for helping you in your transformations. In older versions of PDI, coding JavaScript was the only means you had for doing specific tasks. In the latest releases of PDI, actual steps appeared that eliminate the need for coding in many cases. Here you have some examples of that:
Formula: You saw it in Chapter 3. Before the appearance of this step, there were a lot of functions such as the text functions that you could only solve with JavaScript.
Analytic Query: This step offers a way to retrieve information from rows before or after the current.
Split field to rows: The step is used to create several rows from a single string value. You used this step in Chapter 3 to create a new row for each word found in a file.
Analytic Query and Split fields to row are examples of where not only the need for coding was eliminated, they also eliminated the need for accessing internal objects...
