Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns

Grasping important flat file schema concepts

Flat files have many rules governing them that have been developed and refined over decades. BizTalk goes a long way towards making flat files easy to work with.

Justification: In a positional flat file, the justification will control which side the value in that field is set against. The default justification is left, but it is common for monetary values to be right justified. This is controlled through an attribute on the individual elements in the schema. The following is an example:

• Left-justified elements are often strings as in the following example: "3X2H63 "
• Right justification is common in number fields as in the following example: " 29.55"

Pad character: When values do not fill the entire available ...