Blog — January 26, 2022

Complex data transformations made simple with Mappings

Tomasz Łakomy

Business integrations are anything but straightforward – they are typically composed of many steps that need to be executed sequentially to process a single business transaction.

At a high level, each step can be divided into one of two categories: transporting data and transforming data. In order to enable developers to implement all manner of data transformations with ease, we've built Mappings.

Introducing Mappings

Mappings is a robust JSON-to-JSON data transformation engine that enables developers to define field mappings in an intuitive UI – and then invoke those mappings programmatically via an API.

Mappings is composed of two parts:

a browser-based tool that allows users to create and test JSON-to-JSON data transformations
an API that can be used to programmatically invoke defined mappings at web scale.

Here's a look at the UI...

...and the corresponding API call:

Image of the Launch Mapping modal, showing a node.js code snippet

Using Mappings, developers can transform JSON payloads without the need to write, provision, maintain, or monitor any infrastructure. Mappings is powered by an open-source query and transformation language called JSONata, which comes with a large number of built-in functions and expressions.

Mappings allows developers to solve common tasks like retrieving data from nested structures, manipulating strings, writing conditional expressions, parsing/converting dates, transforming data (with filter, map, reduce functions) and much more.

Using Mappings

As an example, let's build a mapping between an '850' - Purchase Order and a QuickBooks Online Estimate. The Purchase Order is in the X12 EDI format; since Mappings works with JSON as its input and output formats, we need to translate it to JSON first. You can read how to do that here.

Now that we have a JSON source document to start with, we can create a new mapping by navigating to Mappings in Stedi. We'll input the JSON as the source in the first step of the Mapping wizard…

…and we'll input the target JSON in the next step:

With our source and target selected, we can start building a transformation between them by writing simple functions and expressions:

The Mappings UI has autocomplete functionality and built-in documentation. Together, these facilitate a seamless experience for building complex data transformations:

Each mapping can be tested in the UI…

…and executed at web scale using the API.

Mappings is now Generally Available

Mappings allows you to create your own data transformation API - without the need to write, provision, maintain or monitor any code; you focus on building your business logic and we’ll do the rest for you. Mappings has a straightforward pay-per-use pricing model - there are no minimum fees, monthly commitments, or upfront costs to use this product.

Get started today.

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Map data into any shape

Mappings is a tool that maps JSON documents from one structure to another to integrate with any pipeline.

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