Flat File Grammar
The grammar of a flat file is described in the Grammar Element. Although the XML representation of groups of records in flat files may be fairly intuitive, a few diagrams might help make it clearer.
Figure 8.3 shows a typical stream of records in a flat file, using our cocoa invoice as an example. For brevity only the record tags appear in the figure.
Figure 8.3. Record Stream in the Invoice File
If we look only at the records we can't for certain deduce much about the logical structure of a document. We would probably suspect that the HDR record started a new document and that perhaps the LIN and DSC records were a repeating ...
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