When you want to create metadata by extracting them from a flat file, right click Metadata in Outline and select New metadata  Extract from flat file. After that, the Flat file wizard opens.

In the wizard, type the file name or locate it using the Browse…​ button. Once you have selected the file, you can specify the Encoding and Record type options as well. The default Encoding is UTF-8 and the default Record type is delimited.

If the fields of records are separated from each other by some delimiters, you may agree with the default Delimited as the Record type option. If the fields are of some defined sizes, you need to switch to the Fixed Length option.

After selecting the file, its contents will be displayed in the Input file pane. See below:

If you want to extract metadata from a database (when you select the Extract from database option), you must have some database connection defined prior to extracting metadata.

In addition, if you want to extract internal metadata from a database, you can also right-click any connection item in the Outline pane and select New metadata  Extract from database.

After each of these three options, a Database Connection properties dialog opens.

In order to extract metadata, you must first select database connection from the existing ones (using the Connection menu) or load a database connection using the Load from file button or create a new connection as shown in the corresponding section. Once it has been defined, Name, User, Password, URL and/or JNDI fields become filled in the Database Connection wizard.

Then click Next to see a database schema.

Now you have two possibilities:

Either you write a query directly, or you generate the query by selecting individual columns of database tables.

If you want to generate the query, hold Ctrl on the keyboard, highlight individual columns from individual tables by clicking the mouse button and click the Generate button. The query will be generated automatically.

See the following window:

If you check the Prefix table names with schema checkbox, it will have the following form: schema.table.column. If you check the Quote identifiers checkbox, it will look like one of this: "schema"."table"."column" (Prefix table names with schema is checked) or "table"."column" only (the mentioned checkbox is not checked). This query is also generated using the default (Generic) JDBC specific. Only it does not include quotes.

Remember that Sybase has another type of query which is prefixed by schema. It looks like this:

"schema"."dbowner"."table"."column"

Once you have written or generated the query, you can check its validity by clicking the Validate button.

Then you must click Next. After that, MetadataEditor opens. In it, you must finish the extraction of metadata. If you wish to store the original database field length constraints (especially for strings/varchars), choose the fixed length or mixed record type. Such metadata provide the exact database field definition when used for creating (generating) table in a database, see Create Database Table from metadata.

When you want to extract metadata from a DBase file, you must select the Extract from DBF file option.

Locate the file from which you want to extract metadata. The file will open in the following editor:

DBF type, DBF Code Page will be selected automatically. If they do not correspond to what you want, change their values.

When you click Next, the Metadata Editor with extracted metadata will open. You can keep the default metadata values and types and click Finish.

To extract metadata from Salesforce object, right click an edge and select New metadata  Extract from salesforce from context menu.

A wizard for metadata extraction from Salesforce opens.

In the first step, select an existing Salesforce connection or create a new one.

In the second step, enter an SOQL query. You can use Workbench, https://workbench.developerforce.com/, to create an SOQL query and then paste the query to this metadata extraction wizard.

In the last step, check the created metadata. In this step, you can do some customization, e.g. you can rename the record.

To create metadata from an SQL query, right click Metadata in the Outline pane and select New metadata  SQL query metadata. After that, the SQL query metadata editor opens.

In the left pane of this editor, you have to provide a connection to database and an SQL query. You can either create a new connection, or link to an existing one. The SQL Query can be validated - if the query is invalid an error message is shown.

The result of the SQL query is automatically converted to Clover types using the same algorithm that is used when extracting metadata from a database. If there are JDBC types that cannot be converted to Clover types automatically, the metadata creation fails. To avoid this, you can use the Use String for unknown JDBC types option.

In the right pane, you can edit properties of the metadata extracted from the SQL query, and add/remove custom properties by clicking on +/- symbols.

During design time, the structure of the SQL query metadata is automatically initialized, so that it is easier to work with (the user can see what metadata are propagated from it, what fields can be mapped in Transform editors, etc.). Changes to configuration of the SQL query metadata or related connections/parameters trigger a re-initialization of the metadata structure.

If initialization fails during design time, the structure of metadata is unknown. In this case, Transform editor displays the cannot resolve SQL metadata message. Furthermore, the metadata in the Designer’s Outline pane displays an error decorator. Placing a cursor over it, displays details of the error.

To create metadata yourself (User defined), follow these steps:

After opening the Metadata Editor, add a desired number of fields by clicking the plus sign, set up their names, their data types, their delimiters, their sizes, formats and all that has been described above.

For more detailed information see Metadata Editor.

Then click either OK for internal metadata, or Next for external (shared) metadata. In the last case, you only need to select the location (meta, by default) and a name for metadata file. When you click OK, your metadata file will be saved and the extension .fmt will be added to the file automatically.