The Clover Designer

The Clover Designer is a powerful, graphical way of building data transformations and is used by Clover Desktop, Enterprise and Cluster Editions.
 

Every aspect of your data transformation is defined by the Designer. This gives you full control in just one location. If you are using the Enterprise or Cluster versions, then the Designer works directly with a local or remote server. If you are a Standard user, then graphs run locally on your Windows, Mac OS X or Linux machines.

Layout

You design your data transformation graphs by dragging and dropping components from a tool palette into the layout area. Each component represents a logical transformation action and can be configured in as much detail as you need. Clover has deliberately avoided having hundreds of components, each of which does only slightly different things. Instead we have chosen a far simpler approach that means you can make clear choices from a palette of about 40 components. Each of these components, however, is highly configurable.

Debugging

Having built a data transformation graph, you may find that things do not work exactly as expected first time. Clover's excellent debugging capabilities help you visualize data as it flows throughall parts of the graph. The screen shot on the left (click it to enlarge) shows a graph with debugging enabled on the connecting lines. The light blue numbers indicate the number of records flowing along each line. You can then right click any debug enabled line to view the data rows themselves, as shown in the image.