I joined a talend team and everyone seems to be using a context load job. What is this and why should I be using it? I tried searching online for info regarding this but it is very confusing and hard to understand.
Context loading uses files or database tables to 'load' context variables depending on where you deploy the job to. For example, say you have 3 environments DEV, QA, PROD. Each of these environments has their own instance of a database server with identical databases / tables. Say in your job you have context variables that manage those database connections. If they are hard coded into the job itself, regardless of where you deploy your job to, it will always use what is hard coded in the job. So if your job has connection information for you DEV database, regardless of where you deploy(DEV, QA, PROD), you will always connect to your DEV database! Using context loading, you would for example, have a file (or db table) on each server you deploy to that has the connection for that database on that environment. This file / db table is loaded at runtime into your job to populate (or overwrite) those job contexts. So if you deployed to DEV, it would look on the DEV server for the file to retrieve the database connection info for the DEV database. If you deployed to QA, context loading would look for the file on the QA server path to retrieve the database connection for the QA database. Same with PROD. Basically context loading enables easy deployment to other environments / servers with minimal job changes.
