As you may or may not know, my blog articles often revolve around solving issues and challenges that has arisen while using Talend Studio on client projects. Here are a few of the smaller, but no less valued tips and tricks I’ve picked up since working with Talend Studio that weren’t quite large enough to warrant their own post, but I thought were important enough to share with the Talend users and community alike!

I’d be interested to hear both your feedback and any other issues you’ve encountered also, so please take the time to comment below.

You can pull an input or an output component from the repository with a special hotkey

Let’s say you want to get a tFileInputDelimited component in your job. Well, you probably already know that you can click and drag the metadata of a “File Delimited” from the Repository tab. However it will prompt you with all the possible components and you will need to select one. If you want to make this once step faster… Click and hold the Alt key and drag the component. It will automatically generate the input component with all of the metadata defined in the repository. Alternatively, if you wish to place an output component, repeat the same step but substitute the Alt key for the Ctrl key.

Note: Mac users, you may need to experiment, but it probably will end up being the same keys in terms of position on keyboard.

You can view the heap size in real time from Talend

If you are as paranoid about performance as I am, you can add show heap in Talend Studio. To do that all you need to do is go to: Window > Preferences  and search for “General”. Then tick the “Show heap status” as seen in the image below.

After that you will see this small widget in the bottom left corner of the Talend Studio application. In addition to showing the heap size, you can clear it by pressing the recycle button.

You can view the memory usage of a job live.

A new feature of Talend 6.0.1 is “Memory Run”. I touched on this feature briefly in my Talend 6.0.1 review, but since we covered the Heap widget, I thought I would include this one as well. All you need to do is select the “Memory Run” from the run tab within Talend Studio. That will give you a graphical overview of how much memory is used throughout the job. This is a very helpful feature as it allows you to easily identify which components are using up your memory, thus you can start thinking about alternative ways for a solution to a given problem/task without using 4GB of ram.

You can turn off the ‘squiggly’ lines for component connection introduced in Talend 6.0.1

If you have started using Talend 6.0.1 you probably have noticed the visual update. One of the most noticeable changes is the connection line behaviour between components. Well, if you don’t like them you can always go back to the old style. To do that you will need to go to: Window > Preferences and type “Designer”.

Simply untick “Use curved connection style for Job Designer” then click ok and you are set. Please note, you might need to restart Talend Studio if you already had some jobs opened, as they might look a bit strange.

That is it for now. Please share the post and leave a comment if you have any questions or you know of any other useful hacks in Talend Studio.