Matillion 'Generate Job Documentation' Feature

Documentation is an essential part of any project to ensure high quality and control. Documentation that can be automated, be it partly or fully, provides significant benefits to an organisation as it can be maintained and managed with little to no human effort, creating capacity for other tasks.

Matillion provides a ‘Generate Job Documentation’ feature that allows users to generate documentation for any given job at the press of a button. The documentation can be integrated within the organisation’s documentation library, such as Confluence, and put in an appropriate top-down structure. For example, you may integrate your Matillion job designs with overall solution architecture diagrams and overall data integration design diagrams.

How to generate job documentation in Matillion:

By right-clicking on any job in the Explorer panel of the Matillion ETL client and selecting 'Generate Job Documentation', Matillion ETL will generate documentation for that selected job and offer a download of the resulting .html file.

Note: Job documentation generation is an Enterprise-only feature, meaning it is only available to customers on m5.large and m5.xlarge instances.

Steps:

1. Open the Matillion job:

2. Right click on the job:

3. Click on the 'Generate Job Documentation' option and click ok:

4. It will create a HTML link with the generate document, such as: file:///C:/Users//Downloads/Blog%20Job.html

5. Within the .HTML file, a table of contents is given at the top of the page that allows users to quickly browse to a component of interest. The job is shown as a whole, before being broken down into its constituent components.
   
   Each component is labelled according to its component name and properties, providing a thorough overview of the job that can be easily referred to even without access to Matillion ETL itself. Below is an example snippet of the sample job documentation (see the bottom of this page for the attached download link). In this example, a Join component is being documented, showing its local environment on the canvas as well as a table of its properties.

Maintaining job documentation and keeping it up to date is often a challenging and time-consuming process. Matillion’s ‘Generate Job Documentation’ feature provides the ability to do automatic data integration job documentation, therefore creating capacity within the organisation and making life easier for all stakeholders to understand business logic and rules.

If you would like to further understand how you can use Matillion to benefit your business, please get in touch with us.