Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

New DataCell Methods

Three new methods are added to the DataCell base class to support filling and justification. The primary method is fillField, called from the prepareOutput method in the derived classes. It retrieves the appropriate Length and FillCharacter Attributes from the field grammar Element, then calls the justifyFieldLeft or justify FieldRight methods.

Note that in addition to retrieving a Length Attribute from the Grammar Element, fillField also attempts to retrieve a MinLength Attribute. Although we don't need this feature for flat files, we'll need it later for EDI formats, so I include it now. We don't need to be concerned in the code about having both values defined. The file description document schemas ensure that we'll have ...