Record Mapper Overview
The Record Mapper tool provides a quick, efficient way to map data in text files to persistent production messages and back again. In particular, the Management Portal user interface allows you to visually create a representation of a text file and create a valid object representation of that data which maps to a single persistent production message object. The process of generating both the target object structure and an input/output parser is automated, leaving only a few options for the persistent structure of the object projection. InterSystems IRIS® generates the objects in such a way as to be a single persistent tree to provide complete cascading delete operations.
The Management Portal also provides a CSV Wizard to help you convert CSV (Comma Separated Value) files into a record map structure. This is particularly useful for files which contain column headers, as the wizard uses the header names to create the record map properties corresponding to the columns in the sample file.
The Record Mapper handles simple records which are either delimited or have fixed-width fields. A record map consists of a series of fields, which identify data in the record, and composites, which organize fields into a unit. In delimited records, the hierarchal level of composites specify the separator that is used between fields. Within delimited records, you can have simple fields that are repeating. You can not have repeating composites. You can optionally ignore any fields in the incoming text file so that they do not waste space in the stored records.
The Record Mapper is not capable of dealing with mixtures of delimited and fixed-width data, nor is it capable of dynamically adjusting its parser or object structure based on the content of the incoming record other than handling repeating simple fields.
The Complex Record Mapper allows you to handle structured records containing different record types, including the ability to handle structures with repeating records and mixed delimited and fixed-field records.
An additional feature of the Record Mapper package allows you to batch heterogeneous records by implementing a class which inherits from EnsLib.RecordMap.BatchOpens in a new tab. This class handles parsing and writing out any headers and trailers associated with a specific batch. For simple headers and trailers, the Record Mapper user interface permits the creation of a batch of type EnsLib.RecordMap.SimpleBatchOpens in a new tab. You can extend either of these two batch implementations if you need to process more complex header and trailer data.
When a RecordMap batch operation is creating a batch from individual records, it stores the partially constructed batch in an intermediate file. You can specify the location of this file using the IntermediateFilePath property on the batch operation. On a mirrored system, you can store the intermediate file on a network drive that is accessible to both the main and failover system. Then if a failover occurs the failover system can continue to append records to the incomplete batch. Since the incomplete batch is stored in a file and not in an InterSystems IRIS database, it is not automatically copied to the mirror system.
