Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

New DataCell Methods and Derived Classes

For this chapter, in addition to adding a few new derived classes to support our new data types, we also need to add methods to existing classes to handle the requirements of formatting fields for flat file records. We allow the text contents of the field Elements in our input XML documents to be of any length (subject to whatever restrictions you define in your schemas, should you choose to use schemas). However, the fields in our flat file records have fixed lengths. So, if the content from the XML document is shorter than the field, we must fill and justify it appropriately. Conversely, if the content from the XML document is longer than the field, we must truncate it if allowed or force an error if ...