The Designer view

This is the right panel and is designed to be a live update tool to allow you to easily check and manage your aggregation pipelines.

BEFORE

The before view shows you the original document, which is sitting in the existing collection, i.e., the input document.

AFTER

The after view shows you the output document at the end of the pipeline, i.e., what the document will look like once it has gone through the transformation pipeline and is saved in the destination data transform document collection.

FRIENDLY

on the top right you will see 3 tabs; FRIENDLY, JSON and XML. If you click on each tab, you can see the document in each output format and cycle through them to ensure all data is transformed according to your needs.

Search bar in the designer view: this can be found in the right-hand view on the top right. You can input any value in here and it will highlight any fields or values which match.

Document data structure

This will be covered in more detail in another section; however, it is important to know about 3 nodes. Both start with an underscore and contain data which is not part of the document in Utopia, but rather are external nodes which house system data:

_header: This node contains data used by the system for processing, identification and various processes. The important one to know here is the _id field which can be used in the left hand panel to find documents.

_system: this contains a field called “_system.collectedByConnector” which will show you which connector has picked up that document.

_meta: This is arguably the most useful from a user perspective. This field can be added by a user to keep any important data which you might need which cannot form part of the document data. EG: A document ID may be needed as a parameter in an api call but isn’t in the document itself, or you might want to add in some data now to identify the document later on in the process. Some publisher connectors (Data-out connectors) will take the _meta field from the incoming document and add it back to the response. This can be handy if the response you are getting doesn’t contain any identifiers back to the document you sent in.