transformations module

Overview: Transformations is an API for creating and executing data transformation pipelines, enabling higher-level modules to build stuff like Yahoo! Pipes or targeted import/export interfaces on top of it. The purpose of this project is to improve and build upon Transformations so that it not only provides a base framework but also satisfies a larger number of end-user needs, for example an AJAXified user interface.

Description:

Transformations was born out of the desire for a solution that can map any kind of structured data to any kind of other data, such as importing CSV or more complex XML files into Drupal nodes (with field mappings, obviously), exporting the data to the same files, or, if you will, providing an online converter that converts any RSS feed into Atom for example.

When performing such a large-scale transformation, some elements of the source data will likely need to be transformed on a smaller-scale level, e.g. you might need to convert a Unix timestamp into ISO date format at some point, or remove commas from a number string ("1,099.90") to conform to the target format, or perform string replacements on a given string field. At times, you might even need a combination of those transformations, or reference some other entity to construct the desired output data.

In order to do that kind of stuff, a simple mapping screen is not flexible enough, or would require lots of custom code to handle the more specific tasks. Transformations tries to solve that problem by splitting individual data transformation tasks into individual "operations" that can be chained into a larger transformation pipeline.