Install a Custom Talend Component

Talend custom components are a nice way to go around limitations like bugs and missing features. Here is how you install them (tested in version 4.2.3):

1. Download the component (most likely a zipped file) from a provider (most likely from Talend Exchange
2. Uncompress the zip making sure it contains all files inside of the root of the resulting directory
3. Copy the directory to plugins/org.talend.designer.components.localprovider_$TALEND_VERSION/components/
4. Restart Talend and access your component

Some components could fail to be recognized due of issues with the xml declaration schema which you can find with a command similar to:

$ find $TALEND_HOME/ -name "Component.xsd"
/Users/nestor/Downloads/TOS-All-r67267-V4.2.3//configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/bundles/2247/1/.cp/model/Component.xsd

You can validate the component xml against the schema using an online service like http://xsdvalidation.utilities-online.info. That is how I found for example the tFTPGetFile was missing the node. As a side note I also had to repoint to the module edtftpj-1.5.6.jar from the GUI for this component.

Note that you can avoid restarting Talend to get your components recognized and ready to be used. The Generation Engine initialization is responsible to recompile javajet templates. This is triggered when you first load talend but it can be also triggered while pressing shift+ctrl+f3 (add fn if using a MAC).

If you find out the component is unable to load jar files it needs or any other weird behavior consider cleaning the cache deleting the file \configuration\ComponentCache.javacache and restarting Talend after.