What is a Shortcut??
Any object used in more than one folder should be a shortcut.
A Shortcut is a pointer to where the “real” object resides. In terms of object orientation, it is the first level of inheritance. Source tables, target tables, transformations, and mappings are all objects that may leverage shortcuts. Once a shortcut is established, changes are allowed only to the object in its original location. The locations of the shortcut are read-only.In order to create a shortcut Source folder must be shared folder and destination folder must be opened, otherwise it creates a copy instead of shortcut. Read more Advantages of Shortcuts in Informatica
Short nice article !
ReplyDeleteYour object oriented comparison doesn't hold a lot of water. The concept of inheritence allows for extending by the sub-class. That's not happening in Informatica. You can't add anything to a shortcut. It's more like a Windows shortcut on your desktop.
ReplyDeleteThere's still a difference even when comparing to a Windows shortcut. If you make a change to the base file in Windows, all of the shortcuts now reflect that change. If you make a change to the base object in Informatica, you have to go through some non-intuitive process to get the changes to show up in the shortcuts.
For anything that changes with any regularity, especially sources and targets, I would NOT recommend using shortcuts at all.