This guide will allow users to create custom converter plug-ins to change data types, for example from text to numeric. Yellowfin has similar converters embedded throughout its various modules. These can be used on data returned from a Yellowfin view or the Data Transformation module, therefore these converters are applied in-memory after running some form of data query.
This guide is for users who want to create their own converter widgets for Yellowfin. After development, these widgets may be imported into Yellowfin using the plug-in manager. You may write your own converters to convert between any UserInputParameters (UIP) data types. UIP is a generic API used for providing basic UI configuration and persistence to plug-ins.
Instructions on creating converters for view data has been covered first in this guide (we will refer to these as view level converters). Additional configuration will be required in order to make these converters functional for the data transformation module.
Setup Prerequisites
These are the prerequisites for setting up the development environment for writing any Yellowfin plug-in:
Set up your preferred IDE. We recommend Eclipse for EE developers.
Install the Tomcat plug-in for your IDE, if it’s not already included in the installation.
Install the version of Yellowfin to be used for development.
Start up Yellowfin to extract the WAR file.
Guide Contents
Here is the general process for creating a custom data type converter:
- Converter implementation: The core methods required to implement the converter.
- Data transformation extras: Additional methods to make the converter available for the Data Transformation module.
- Configuration UI: Provide a configuration UI for user specific settings.
- Package your converter: Finally, package your data type converter to load it into Yellowfin.
Next topic: Converter implementation