Actian DataConnect Settings¶

Configure Actian DataConnect to match your workflow and preferences. This guide covers all available settings for customizing the application appearance, data quality defaults, execution behavior, user-defined connections, macros, and packaging and deployment.

Overview¶

Actian DataConnect provides comprehensive settings to customize your DataConnect experience:

• AI Provider: Configure AI/LLM providers used by AI-assisted features
• Appearance: Dialog preferences, text size, theme, and window preferences
• Data Quality: Default data sampling, rule defaults, suppression preferences, and threshold preferences for data quality designs
• Execution: Logging preferences for maps, processes, and data quality designs
• General: User-defined connections folder location
• License: View and manage your DataConnect license
• Macros: Variable management for reusable configurations
• Package and Deploy: Packaging and deployment preferences

Navigating Settings¶

Settings open with a navigation tree on the left that groups options into categories. Some categories—such as Appearance, Data Quality, and General—expand to reveal subsections. Select any item to jump to that section in the content area on the right.

At the top of the navigation tree, use Expand all to open every category at once or Collapse all to close them. You can also drag the divider between the navigation tree and the content area to resize the panel.

AI Provider Settings¶

Configure the AI/LLM providers that power AI-assisted features in Actian DataConnect, such as Inspect Data and recommend rules, and the Ask AI assistant. DataConnect uses a bring-your-own-model approach — it does not host an LLM, so you add your own provider and model. When none is configured, the page shows a No AI provider added message ("Subscription-powered AI integration within Data Connect") with Add and Learn more options.

Adding an AI Provider¶

To add an AI provider:

1. Navigate to Settings > AI provider.
2. Click Add (top-right, or the button in the empty state). The Add AI provider panel opens.
3. From AI Provider, choose a provider: OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft Azure, Google Gemini, Google Vertex, Groq, AWS Bedrock, Ollama, or OpenAI Compatible.
4. In Configuration Name, enter a name for this provider configuration (for example, OpenAI).
5. (Optional) Enable Set as default to use this provider for AI features.
6. Provide the provider's credentials and connection details. The common fields are:
   • API Key: The provider's API key (stored securely). Required for most providers; optional for Ollama and OpenAI Compatible; not used by AWS Bedrock or Google Vertex (which use their own authentication).
   • Model (required): After you enter a valid API key, the list loads the available models — or you can type a model name directly.
   • Temperature (required): Sampling temperature for responses. Default: 0.2.
   • Max Tokens (required): Maximum number of tokens per response. Default: 4096.
   • Timeout (seconds) (required): Request timeout in seconds. Default: 120.
   • Send sampled data to LLM (optional): Includes a small, masked sample of your data as few-shot examples in AI requests to improve suggestion accuracy. Enabled by default. See the note below.
   • Model Capability Overrides (optional, advanced): Override the model's detected capabilities.
7. Provide any provider-specific settings (see the table below).
8. (Optional) Click Test Connection to verify the credentials and load the available models.
9. Click Add Provider to save the provider.

Provider-specific settings:

Saved providers appear in a list where you can edit, delete, or change which provider is the default.

Appearance Settings¶

Customize the visual appearance and theme of Actian DataConnect to suit your preferences and working environment.

Theme Customization (Light, Dark, System)¶

Choose from three theme options to match your personal preference or system settings:

• Light: A bright theme optimized for well-lit environments
• Dark: A dark theme that reduces eye strain in low-light conditions
• System: Automatically matches your operating system's theme setting

To change the theme:

1. Navigate to Settings > Appearance
2. Click on your preferred theme option (Light, Dark, or System)
3. The theme will be applied immediately
4. Click Restore Defaults to reset to the System theme

Text Size¶

Scale the interface independently from the code editors. Drag a slider or click a marker (Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large) to snap to a size; changes apply immediately. Both default to 100%.

• Interface: Scales chrome, panels, dialogs, navigation, and tables.
• Code Editors: Scales the Monaco editor surfaces (SQL, scripts, transformations, JSON).

Click Restore Defaults to reset both sliders to 100%.

Dialog Preferences¶

Dialog positions and sizes are saved automatically as you resize or move them, so dialogs reopen where you last left them.

• When nothing has been saved, the page shows No saved dialog positions yet.
• Once saved, each dialog (for example, Create Macro, Paste Macros, and New Artifact) appears as a card showing its saved X and Y position and width and height.
• Click Reset All Positions to clear all saved dialog positions.

Window Preferences¶

The application window size and position are saved automatically when you close the app.

• When nothing has been saved, the page shows No saved window preferences yet.
• Once saved, the Application Window card shows the saved X and Y position and width and height, with a Maximized or Custom Size badge.

Data Quality Settings¶

Configure default values applied when creating new data quality designs, so validation and cleansing behavior stays consistent across designs. The Data Quality category has four subsections: Default Data Sampling, Rule Defaults, Suppression Preferences, and Threshold Preferences.

Default Data Sampling¶

Controls how many records a new data quality design analyzes by default. Choose the scope to balance performance against coverage — a larger scope is more thorough but slower on large datasets.

• Select number of records: Choose how records are selected for analysis.
  • Specific range: Analyze records within a defined range. Enter the From records and To records values (the default range is 1 to 10000). Useful for inspecting a specific data segment.
  • All records: Analyze every record in source data order. Most thorough, but slower on large datasets.
• Inspect & Recommend Efficiency Percentage: A threshold percentage applied during data quality analysis. Default: 86.
• Retain Source Order: When enabled, preserves the source record order when writing to pass and fail targets. Enabled by default for new data quality designs.

To restore sampling defaults to their original values, click the Restore Defaults button.

Rule Defaults¶

Rule defaults define the initial configuration values used when applying data quality rules, including duplicate detection, date/time formatting, binning, and regional settings. These settings help ensure consistency across your data quality designs and analysis operations.

For complete definitions of all available data quality rules, see the Rule Reference. These default settings impact how rule parameters are preset and displayed when you configure rules in the Data Quality Designer.

• Duplicate Value, min count: Specifies the minimum number of occurrences required for a value to be considered a duplicate. Default: 2

• Equal range binning, range count: Defines the number of bins to use when performing equal range binning analysis on numeric data. This helps categorize continuous values into discrete ranges. Default: 10

• Preferred date pattern: Select the date format pattern to use for date validation rules. Default: yyyy-MM-dd (2024-03-06)

  • yyyy-MM-dd (2024-03-06)
  • MM/dd/yyyy (03/06/2024)
  • dd/MM/yyyy (06/03/2024)
  • dd-MMM-yyyy (06-Mar-2024)
  • MMM dd, yyyy (Mar 06, 2024)

• Preferred timestamp pattern: Select the timestamp format pattern to use for timestamp validation rules. Default: yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss

  • yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss
  • yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss (ISO 8601)
  • MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss
  • dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss
  • yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS (with milliseconds)

• Preferred time pattern: Select the time format pattern to use for time validation rules. Default: HH:mm:ss (24-hour)

  • HH:mm:ss (24-hour)
  • hh:mm:ss a (12-hour with AM/PM)
  • HH:mm (24-hour without seconds)
  • hh:mm a (12-hour without seconds)
  • HH:mm:ss.SSS (with milliseconds)

• Most frequent values top how many: Specifies how many of the most frequently occurring values to display in analysis reports. Default: 25

• Default region: Select the default region for locale-specific data validation rules. This affects how data is interpreted based on regional formats. Default: United States

  • United States
  • United Kingdom
  • Canada
  • Australia
  • Germany
  • France
  • Spain
  • Italy
  • Japan
  • China

To restore rule defaults to their original values, click the Restore Defaults button.

Suppression Preferences¶

Default suppression behavior for new data quality designs. These correspond to the Suppress options on a design's Execution configuration.

• Suppress Remediation Rules: Whether to skip applying remediation transformations to failing records by default. Default: False.
• Suppress Pass Target: Whether to skip writing passing records to the pass target by default. Default: True.
• Suppress Fail Target: Whether to skip writing failing records to the fail target by default. Default: True.

To restore these values to their defaults, click the Restore Defaults button.

Threshold Preferences¶

Default runtime and quality-dimension alert thresholds for new data quality designs.

• Execution Time (Minutes): Maximum execution time before a runtime alert is triggered. Default: 0.
• Dimension thresholds (Percent: 1-100): Alert threshold for each quality dimension — Accuracy, Completeness, Consistency, Timeliness, Uniqueness, and Validity. An alert triggers when a dimension's score falls below its threshold; a value of 0 (the default) disables the alert for that dimension.

To restore these values to their defaults, click the Restore Defaults button.

Execution Settings¶

Configure execution logging, message handling, and log file management for data integration maps, ETL processes, and data quality designs in Actian DataConnect. Control how errors, warnings, and debug information are captured during execution.

Message and Logging Defaults¶

You can set default logging options that will be applied to every new map, process, and data quality design. These settings can be overridden for individual artifacts on their Configuration tab.

• Clear messages after run: Specifies whether to clear message object content after executing a map, process, or data quality design when the Run button is clicked. Default: Not selected (unchecked)

  • When selected: Message object content is cleared after execution, including messages in sub-processes
  • When not selected: Message object content is retained. If you run the artifact a second time, the message objects will contain the same values they had after the previous execution

• Clear log file before run: Specifies whether to retain the log file data before executing a map, process, or data quality design. Default: Not selected (unchecked)

  • When selected: Log file content is cleared before execution
  • When not selected: Log file content is retained, and new content is appended

  Note

  This setting applies to all newly created maps, processes, and data quality designs. Existing artifacts will maintain their current settings. If specified in the Configuration tab, this option overrides the preference setting.

• Error types to log: Allows you to select the types of error messages to include in the log file. Messages are logged up to the selected log type including all previous log types in the order of precedence. Default: Errors

  • Errors: Logs only errors that may cause a map or process execution to stop
  • Warnings: Logs both errors and warnings (messages about data truncation, field name changes, loss of precision, or other issues)
  • Informative messages: Logs errors, warnings, and informative messages (such as "Execution initialization", "Execution successful", number of records converted/deleted/updated/inserted, time to convert, and whether the transformation was stopped)
  • Debug messages: Logs all message types including debug messages. All messages generated as a result of a TraceOn action are logged at this level, including record numbers, first five fields of each record, and all events

To restore execution settings to their original values, click the Restore Defaults button.

General Application Settings¶

Configure general application preferences. In v14, this category contains a single setting: User-Defined Connections.

User-Defined Connections¶

Configure the folder location for dataset files used as source and target connections. This setting allows you to centralize connection files for reuse across data quality designs.

• Folder Path: Specify or browse to the folder where user-defined connection files will be saved
  • Enter a custom path directly in the text field
  • Click the folder icon to browse and select a folder
  • Leave blank or click Restore Defaults to use the default location

Default location: C:/Users/<username>/Actian/DataConnect/UDConnections

To restore the user-defined connections path to the default location, click the Restore Defaults button.

License Settings¶

View your Actian DataConnect license details and point the application to a license file.

License Information¶

The License page displays the following read-only details for the active license:

To change the license file, click Browse... and select a .slc license file. The page then reloads the license details from the selected file.

Macro Management Settings¶

Manage macro definitions and variables for data integration maps, ETL processes, and data quality designs. Macros provide parameterization and reusable configuration values for connection strings, file paths, credentials, and environment-specific settings.

The Macros settings page provides a comprehensive interface for:

• Loading and managing macro definition files
• Creating and organizing macro sets (artifact-specific and global)
• Defining macro name-value pairs with optional encryption
• Importing and exporting macro configurations
• Adding descriptions to document macro usage

To configure and manage macros, including creating macro sets, defining macro values, and importing/exporting macro files, see Macro Manager.

Package and Deploy Settings¶

Configure packaging and deployment preferences for Actian DataConnect projects.

Packaging Options¶

• Store package in workspace: When enabled, packages are stored in the workspace. Enabled by default.
• Package Directory: The folder where packages are written. Default location: C:/Users/<username>/Actian/DataConnect/Packages.
• Always create external RTC for package: When enabled, an external runtime configuration (.rtc) file is created for each package. Enabled by default.
• Always overwrite external RTC file: When enabled, an existing external .rtc file is overwritten. Enabled by default.

To restore these values to their defaults, click the Restore Defaults button.

See also¶

Data Quality¶

• Data Quality Overview - Complete guide to data quality
• Rule Reference - Data quality rules reference guide
• Data Prep Rules - Data preparation and cleansing rules

Configuration and Management¶

• Macro Manager - Detailed macro configuration and management
• Interface Overview - Actian DataConnect user interface guide
• Getting Started Guide - Getting started with Actian DataConnect

Best Practices¶

• Best Practices - Actian DataConnect best practices and recommendations
• Design for Reuse - Building reusable integration components
• Architect the Solution - Solution architecture guidance

Frequently Asked Questions¶

How do I change the application theme?¶

Navigate to Settings > Appearance and select your preferred theme (Light, Dark, or System). The theme is applied immediately without requiring a restart.

What is the difference between random sampling and specific range sampling?¶

Random sampling analyzes a statistically representative subset of records for faster processing, while specific range sampling analyzes a defined range of records (e.g., records 1-10000) for inspecting specific data segments.

How do I configure macros for different environments?¶

Use the Macro Manager to create environment-specific macro sets (development, testing, production) with different values for connection strings, file paths, and credentials. See Macro Manager for detailed instructions.

What logging level should I use in production?¶

For production environments, use Errors or Warnings logging level to minimize log file size and performance impact. Use Informative or Debug levels only for troubleshooting specific issues.