How to getting started with the Talend Cloud connector in Qlik Application Automation

[MarkGeurtsen]

This article provides an overview of the Talend Cloud connector in Qlik Application Automation and how to get started.

Content:

• Authentication
• Available blocks
• Use cases:​
• Task Chaining and Orchestration

Talend is a data management platform that provides solutions for data integration, data quality, data preparation, big data, and application integration. More information can be found here: https://www.talend.com/

A trial account for Talend can be created here: https://iam.us.cloud.talend.com/idp/trial-registration

See the below video for a demo to get you started with the Talend Cloud and Stitch connectors in automations:

Authentication

In order to authenticate to the Talend Cloud connector, you’ll need to generate an API key for your Talend account. The connector will use this API key for authentication and authorization purposes. When creating the connection in automations, you will be prompted with a popup screen to select a region.

Regions can be:

• Us
• Eu
• Ap
• Au
• Us-west

You will also need to provide the API key. You can generate it in Talend Cloud.

1. Open the Talend Cloud
2. Navigate to the top right corner and hovering over your username
3. Choosing Profile Preferences
   
   
   
   
4. This opens the About Me page.
5. In the left side panel go to (a) Personal Access Tokens and click (b) Add token.
   
   
   
   The generated token can be used in the automations connector.

Available blocks

The following blocks are available in the Talend Cloud connector:

• Execute Task
• List Available Tasks
• Get Task Status
• Wait for Tasks to Complete
• Resume Task
• Pause Task
• Run Crawler
• List Crawlers
• Get Crawler Status
• List Connections
• List Data Preparations
• Run Data Preparation
• Get Data Preparation Run
• List Data Preparations Run History
• Raw API Request

Use cases:​

By exposing the Talend APIs as connector blocks in automations, you can orchestrate Talend tasks and integrate them with Qlik Cloud. It’s also possible to interact with the Data Inventory for data quality and data governance needs. ​

• Task chaining of Talend tasks with other business processes​
• Schedule JDBC crawlers to update the Data Inventory ​
• Schedule runs of data preparations that applies formatting operations on the new datasets to regularly clean incoming data. For more information about data preparations, please check the following article.
• Raw API request blocks will provide the flexibility to build use cases that are not yet supported through native blocks

Task Chaining and Orchestration

One of the areas where Qlik Application Automation can provide value to users is by being an orchestrator for tasks in Talend Cloud. The Execute Task block can trigger tasks and the Wait For Tasks To Complete block can listen to one or multiple tasks to finish before proceeding on a subsequent job.

This can be useful for scenarios where you might want to run two or more tasks in parallel before proceeding with another task. 

See the below video for an in-depth Task Chaining example: