Executing a job or a transformation from a job by setting arguments and parameters dynamically

Suppose that you developed a transformation which reads command-line arguments or defines named parameters. Now you want to call that transformation from a job, but you don't know the values for the arguments or the parameters; you have to take them from some media, for example, a file or a table in a database. This recipe shows you how to get those values and pass them to the transformation at runtime.

For this recipe, suppose that you want to create a file with a sequence of numbers. You have a transformation that does it. The problem is that the limits FROM and TO and the INCREMENT value are stored in a properties file. This presents an obstacle to calling the transformation directly, but can be done with Kettle in a very simple way.

Getting ready

You need a sample transformation that generates a file with a sequence as described in the introduction. Make sure you have defined the variable ${OUTPUT_FOLDER...