Jitterbit – Column Names are not coming by default in Flat file target.

Jitterbit is an integration tool that delivers a quick and easy way to design and build integration solutions. You can go through my blog post Introduction to Jitterbit to get an overview of this tool.

Here we are discussing one potential issue that I have encountered while using this tool and a workaround to fix the issue.

I created a simple integration project in which I tried to export the data from Salesforce (Source) and write it to a flat file (target) in a Jitterbit operation. Interestingly, the data records got captured in the target file, but the header information containing the Column Names was missing from the target file.

I was unable to find any setting in the flat file structure definition that asked about including/excluding header from flat files.

After doing some further research, I found out that I need to use a Jitterbit plugin – PrependData - to get the column names in the file.

Please find below the steps that I had followed to fix the issue:

• Download the PrependData plugin (zip archive) from Jitterbit Plugin page.
• Extract the Zip Archive plugin files and move or copy the extracted root folder to JITTERBIT_HOME/Plugins/Pipeline/User/. Then restart the Jitterbit Process Engine service.
• Create a new Script object and add the following text in the script:

• $DataToPrepend="Column_1, Column_2, Column_3\n";

$DataToPrepend is a standard global variable of Jitterbit and Column_1, Column_2 are the exact column names.

• In the Jitterbit operation, add this Script object created in the above step just before the target object.
• Now we need to assign the plugin to the target. So right Click on the Target object and select the Plugin option. This will list all the available installed plugins.  Select the DataToPrepend plugin and click Assign button to complete the assignment.

• Save the changes, deploy the operation and project and execute the project.
• And thus, the column names appear in the flat file.

This is a bit overkill on part of jitterbit as writing to a flat file target with column names should be a standard functionality and using of script and plugin make a simple integration complex.

I hope Jitterbit will address this issue in their future releases and make it part of their standard functionality.