Delimited text file -> XML - documentation

Legacy Contributor

Hi,

Is there any good documenation about creating a file template to convert a delimited text file into XML.

The text file I need to convert consists of different line types (Header and lines).

 

I think I understand how to crate the file type for a text file with one line type, but how do you do it for multiple line types with different fields.

I'd really appreciate if someone could guide me or point me to document describing the usage of file types for multi-linetype text files.

 

Regards

Daniel

Legacy Contributor

Hi Daniel:

This is a known enhancement topic that is currently being worked on the roadmap. So ideally, in the long term there will be new scripting techniques which would allow you to such mapping in ION.



For the short term, there are a couple of hacks ;-) by which you can achieve this. Both of them require the extraction/ string tokenising/ XML construction - to be performed by you!



1. DB Stored procedures allow advance file handling techniques. So you could read your file in a Stored procedure/ tokenize it yourself in PL/SQL and can return the results as XML. You can use a DB connector to trigger the SP and get your XML into ION.



2. This one is more of a sledge-hammer route, but will work

- Use the Binary file template option to let the File connector pick up the csv and pass it as is into ION.

- Internally this content will get base 64 encoded and will move through ION.

- Pass this file through a mapping step. Use the Advanced mapping option which allows you to do the XSLT programming. ION provides you with two out of the box functions to encode and decode base64 content. In your XSLT code, you can first use the decode binary function. This will stream the complete file contents into a string variable which will be available to your XSLT code. You can further tokenise this string and construct your XML using XSLT. This is a tedious job, but this way you would have effectively converted the CSV string into an XML.

- The output of the mapping step will be a custom BOD XML that you just coded through XSLT and can be consumed as such by the receiving application.

- If you want to split on a repeatable element in this XML, because you want to produce multiple BODs instead of one single BOD, you can further send your contents through a splitter step in the document flow.



I think samples for how to decode and encode a binary file from your XSLT code is available in the ION Desk admin guide.



Hope this helps!



Not sure if you want to take the trouble, but if you do try option #1 or #2 above, may I please ask you to share your code back here in the forum?



Best Regards

Vignesh