Input Source Element

An Input Source element represents input to your view model from an external source.

The source of data for an Input Source element can be any one of the following:

A database operation or virtual database operation
A data service that produces result set or XML output
A data catalog file in XML or CSV format
A web services call
A SQL view

While some input sources take their input from nonrelational data, all of them have a single output in which their data is formatted as a result set, as if it had come from a relational database query. To configure an Input Source element, you must specify the original source of the data, set up a transformation if the data isn’t already in result set format, and specify values for any parameters the input requires.

To create input sources that are based on elements in your Data Federation domain, you can drag and drop items directly from Enterprise Explorer view into your view model. These include database operations, virtual database operations, other data services, and files. The view model editor attempts to do as much of the configuration as possible. (For example, if you drag a data service that takes no parameters into your model, the resulting Input Source element will be fully configured. If you drag an XML file into your view model, you must configure the transformation to construct a result set from the XML data.)

Note: To create input rows that don’t come from an external input source, use the Generator operator in your view model.