Today's blog entry comes from Tony Parandi, Assistant Director of Institutional Research at Indiana Wesleyan University:
One feature of Veera that I’ve found very helpful is the
Subroutine node. This node allows you to feed the output of another job
directly into the job you’re currently working on. In essence, it allows you to
put a job within a job. This is especially helpful if you have a certain data
stream that you commonly use, and do not want to rebuild it each time you need
it.
An example that I commonly use the Subroutine node for is the
recoding of student ethnicity. In 2010, when the Department of Education
mandated the new ethnicity categories, we added two additional ethnicity/race
fields to our data system (Datatel). Thus, students could have a wide myriad of
ethnic category combinations, which means we have to reform these combinations
to match the IPEDS definitions. In order to accomplish this I bring in the
ethnic data from our warehouse, and use a series of transform nodes to convert
the three ethnicity fields into one final ethnic category:
Rather than recreate this stream
for every job, I have it saved as a separate job, called “Ethnic Conversion”. As
you can see in the picture above, the Output Proxy node is necessary when
creating a job for Subroutine purposes as it connects the output data to the
Subroutine to the other job you’re building.
Now when I create a new job
that needs ethnicity reformatting, I simply bring in a Subroutine node and
connect to my data via Student ID in the Merge node.
Although this is a small and
simple example of a Subroutine job, the node is a powerful way to connect jobs
without having to do copy/pasting or rebuilding. I have found the Subroutine
node to be a great time saver, and I encourage everyone to use it whenever
possible.
PS: Be sure to check out the rest of our customer tips series here!
PS: Be sure to check out the rest of our customer tips series here!
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