What's new in HALE 2.8?

HALE 2.8 comes with some nice new features since the last release HALE 2.7.0 - especially the database support, the possibility to configure sample data and the advanced scripting capabilities.

Database access

Use PostgreSQL/PostGIS databases as schema and data source for a transformation with the new JDBC based database support in HALE. To combine information from different database tables in a mapping, use the Join function. Support for additional types of databases can be provided through plug-ins.

For more information, see the Database Import documentation.

Define sample data

Source data you load in HALE is used in the live transformation to allow you to directly see the impact of changes to the mapping in the transformed data. But the source data may be to big for it to be reasonable to transform it with every change. Now you can configure that only a sub-set of the data is loaded into HALE, which in most cases also speeds up the import. With only the sub-set loaded in HALE you can still perform the transformation on the whole data set through the Transform project data... option in the Transformation menu.

For more information, see Working with a source data set.

Advanced transformation scripts

Advanced users can combine the regular HALE transformation functions with powerful Groovy scripts. HALE now comes with easy-to-use APIs for accessing and creating complex instances. The new script editor supports syntax highlighting and script validation. Detailed help and generated example code based on the concrete source and target structure is available as well.

If you are looking at this page from your local copy of HALE you can directly load these example projects to get an idea on how to work with Groovy scripts in the transformation:

Groovy property transformation example using the Groovy script function
Groovy type transformation example using the Groovy Retype function

Improved classification UI

The user interface for the classification mapping function now uses a tabular representation and has some new features:

Fill the lookup table with values encountered in the source data (Occurring values) or enumeration values defined in the schema
Load the lookup table from a CSV or Excel file
Save the lookup table as a CSV or Excel file

Load recent resources

Now not only recently loaded projects but all recently loaded resources are remembered. When loading From file or From URL just use the button on the left of the text field to select the recently loaded resources that are applicable for the import. This is especially helpful if you have files that you import both as schema and as data, for instance Shapefiles.

Join XML objects

The Join transformation function enables you to combine information from different types of objects in the mapping. Originally this was only possible based on attributes that have the same value. This is a problem with references in XML, as the reference is not the same as the referenced identifier. Now HALE supports matching local XLink references to XML identifiers automatically.

Reload source data

HALE now allows you to manually reload the source data imported into the project, e.g. when the data was subject to changes. Also, many of the data importers in HALE only import data for types in the source schema that are marked as relevant for the mapping - for example the XML/GML and database importers. If you mark additional types in this way after the data was loaded, you can now update the loaded data accordingly.