Nice work on the Palo addition (since plug-in now won't be the correct concept) to Kettle.
Besides the current Palo (Cube) Input and Output Steps I would like to see Palo Dimension Input and Output Steps.
The Palo Dimension Output Step should basically mimic the Excel PALO.EADD function having options to select Connection, Cube and Dimension, be able to receive Type, Element, Parent Element and Weight from source steps and also have an option to clear the dimension in advance.
The Palo Dimension Input Step should retrieve the same types of data: Type, Element, Parent Element, Weight and as a useful addition also the level in the dimension hierarchy for each element. The last field would make it easy to do a number of stream lookups in Kettle to convert the Palo parent-child hierarchy to a level-based hierarchy (putting data for each level in different columns/fields).
From the documentation I guess that I should be able to use the Palo Rule step (that seems very powerful) to do the above actions, but that will require work to create the correct rules and then it almost seems easier to load dimensions through the ordinary Excel add-in.
Regards,
Bent
