Hi,

I am fairly new to Talend and I need some help with some implementation questions. I need to iterate through any files in a directory and process them. For each file, I need to make a decision row by row. In each row I process, there will be a card number column and value. For each row, I need to query our mysql database and see if that card number has an associated user id. If it does, I need to grab that associated user id and map it to an output file with the data from the original file. If it doesn't, I need to store all of the data from that row being processed into some sort of a batch file for later processing.

If you have any suggestions on what components would be best to use, that would be great. There seems to be quite a range of resources but not enough documentation to describe the situations they are best used. I was planning on using a tfilelist to iterate through each of the files in the proper directory. Then I plan to process each file using a tFileInputDelimited. After this, I run into difficulties with the implementation ideas. I think I should use tMySQLInput for the query, but I'd like to be able to run a very specific query like "SELECT user_id FROM user_table WHERE cardnumber = (variable with that row's card number)", but I can't figure out how to handle passing in a variable like that to the query and I also don't understand what happens after the query. If an entry is found, what happens and how do I handle passing that entry to the mapping component? If the entry isn't found, what happens? How can I dictate that row to be saved for later processing in a different batch file.

Anyway, I know this is a long post, but any help is appreciated. Talend seems like a great tool but even after paging through the documentation I feel like I don't have a grasp on it and clearly I don't.