Notes about using Pentaho Data Integration and Apache Hop as Non-Programmer
When you want to query a REST API but have values that need url-encoding first, you can use a User Defined Java Expression:
In this particular example it is necessary as PDI would throw the error (“Illegal character in path”) if you query the following URL unmodified from a string:
There are several possibilities in Pentaho Data Integration to put together several fields:
This step is very straightforward if you want to concat fields using the same separator:
Similar to Excel you can create a new string using your fields and ad hoc defined strings in the Formula step:
Pentaho & Apache Hop Hints 