Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns

Working with positional flat files

Not all flat files are delimited. Some systems, particularly mainframe and AS400, send files by a different method altogether. These are positional flat files that do not use delimiters between fields, but use their character position within a line of the file. These files are called positional files.

BizTalk is capable of dealing with positional flat files as well and we happen to have such a file from one of our mail order resellers that we must incorporate. The file is available at http://biztalk2010patterns.com//documents/order-processing/CatalogOrders.txt. This file contains very similar data to the delimited flat file, but as can be seen, it is in fact positional. We will now create the schema for this file. ...