I came across a format today which allows fields to be fixed length or delimited on a per element basis. The delimiter is allowed to vary on a per element basis. This indicates that the delimiter would be naturally modelled as a terminator in DFDL, as opposed to a separator. However, the final terminator in the document must never appear. Not can be missing, but must be missing. This suggests that dfdl:documentFinalTerminatorCanBeMissing is not flexible enough, and needs to apply on unparsing, and maybe needs to be a 3 way property...
- 'yes' -> can be omitted when parsing, output when unparsing
- 'no' -> must be present when parsing, output when unparsing
-, 'always'. -> must not be present when parsing, must not be output when unparsing

Regards

Steve Hanson
Architect, Data Format Description Language (DFDL)
Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group
IBM SWG, Hursley, UK
smh@uk.ibm.com
tel:+44-1962-815848

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