Flat File Formats

Comprehensive Support for a Range of Formats

XML Pipeline Server™ provides built-in support for many common flat file formats. And using XML Pipeline Server’s powerful extensibility mechanism, developers build custom XML Pipeline Servers for enterprise-specific file formats.

Overall, XML Pipeline Server™ provides support for a wide variety of flat file formats which are processed by either built-in XML Pipeline Servers or user-defined, custom XML Pipeline Servers. XML Pipeline Server™ leverages a streaming environment, providing scalability without sacrificing performance.

  • Flat Files – such as comma- and tab-separated value files
  • Fixed-width Files – like dumps from databases or certain EDI-like formats
  • Tagged Files – which contain multiple row types within a single data stream
  • Hybrid Files – those that contain mixtures of the above qualities

Built-In Flat File Conversion

XML Pipeline Server provides built-in support for many common flat file formats. Specifically, the following file types are supported out-of-the-box:

  • Base-64
  • Binary
  • CSV
  • dbase (II, III, III+, IV, V)
  • DIF
  • DotD
  • HTML
  • JavaProps
  • JSON
  • Pyx
  • RTF
  • SDI
  • SYLK
  • Tab-separated values
  • Whole-line text
  • Windows .ini file
  • Windows Write

Custom Flat File Conversion

When it comes to XML conversion, XML Pipeline Server understands more than just textual data types. Often a file will contain binary information in any number of specialized formats — from hardware-specific types like BCD or IEEE Floats and Doubles to cross-platform standards such as COBOL Comp3 or ISO 8601 Date Time. Rather than having to resort to extension functions, using XML Pipeline Server lets developers specify the exact native data type and then automatically handles the conversion. Supported data types include:

  • BCD (Binary Coded Decimal)
  • Float
  • Binary (including the W3C Schema types base64Binary and hexBinary)
  • Boolean (including support for null or unknown values)
  • Integer (32-bit integers)
  • Byte (8-bit integers)
  • Long (64-bit integers)
  • Comp3 (the COBOL internal format; “IBM Packed”)
  • Number (unlimited-precision numbers)
  • Date (in multiple languages)
  • Short (16-bit integers)
  • DateTime
  • String
  • Decimal (from System.Decimal on .Net)
  • Time
  • Double Zoned (“IBM Zoned” mainframe datatype)
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