This is my brain dump of things related to doing development in Kettle.

Writing a new transformation step

1. In a step, when you call getRow(), you get back an array of Objects. These objects can be ValueMetaInterface objects, or they can be byte arrays. You have to check this before working with the data! You can use instanceof byte[] to determine if you have a byte array or not. the csv file input step in particular can do this if lazy conversion is enabled, which it is by default. ValueMetaInterface has a method convertBinaryStringToNativeType that you can pass a byte array to and get back the native type (presumably something that implements ValueInterface, although the method return just Object)