Calculator

Note: The execution speed of the Calculator is far better than the speed provided by custom scripts (JavaScript).

In addition to the arguments (Field A, Field B and Field C) you must also specify the return type of the function. You can also choose to remove the field from the result (output) after all values are calculated; this is useful in cases where you use temporary values that don’t need to end up in your pipeline fields.

Q: I made a pipeline using A/B in a calculator transform and it rounded wrong: the 2 input fields are integer but my result type was Number(6, 4) so I would expect the integers to be cast to Number before executing the division.

If I wanted to execute e.g. 28/222, I got 0.0 instead of 0.1261 which I expected. So it seems the result type is ignored. If I change the input types both to Number(6, 4) I get as result 0.12612612612612611 which still ignores the result type (4 places after the comma).

Why is this?

A: Length & Precision are just metadata pieces.

If you want to round to the specified precision, you should do this in another transform. However: please keep in mind that rounding double point precision values is futile anyway. A floating point number is stored as an approximation (it floats) so 0.1261 (your desired output) could (would probably) end up being stored as 0.126099999999 or 0.1261000000001 (Note: this is not the case for BigNumbers)

So in the end we round using BigDecimals once we store the numbers in the output table, but NOT during the pipeline. The same is true for the Text File Output transform. If you would have specified Integer as result type, the internal number format would have been retained, you would press “Get Fields” and it the required Integer type would be filled in. The required conversion would take place there and then.

In short: we convert to the required metadata type when we land the data somewhere, NOT BEFORE.

Q: How do the data types work internally? A: You might notice that if you multiply an Integer and Number, the result is always rounded. That is because Calculator takes data type of the left hand size of the multiplication (A) as the driver for the calculation. As such, if you want more precision, you should put field B on the left hand side or change the data type to Number and all will be well.