Every major vendor of enterprise software has at least one, and likely ½ dozen tools that deal with binary/text file formats. The goal of DFDL is to reduce the redundant effort in creating and maintaining these tools, and to encourage cross-vendor compatibility with these format specifications, which are quite hard to create and to debug/maintain.

BEA is particularly big on “converting” binary data to XML, which to me mostly makes sense logically, but physically is awfully inefficient.

…mike

From: dfdl-wg-bounces@ogf.org [mailto:dfdl-wg-bounces@ogf.org] On Behalf Of RPost
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 8:18 PM
To: dfdl-wg@ogf.org
Subject: [DFDL-WG] Info on BEAs Format Builder - Java GUI to convert binaryto/from XML

Hi,

Open mouth – insert foot. At my current contract site I happened to mention to some people that BEA has a Format Builder app that can convert binary to/from XML. Seems they had a team of people halfway through a project writing custom Java code to read Mainframe files (mostly copybook) and load the data into Oracle but hadn’t known that the BEA Integration suite they had been using for years already had that functionality.

Reminds me of my favorite definition: Contractor – someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.

I had assumed you all were aware of BEAs Format Builder but figured I would pass the info on anyway.

1. From the BEA docs page: http://e-docs.bea.com/

2. Select BEA WebLogic Integration under the BEA WebLogic section (http://e-docs.bea.com/wli/docs102/index.html)

3. Select ‘Using Format Builder’ under the Data Transformation section (http://e-docs.bea.com/wli/docs102/fbhelp/index.html).

You can select ‘view as PDF’ to save a local copy.

There is also a tutorial on creating a WebLogic Integration Process to extract mainframe data (cobol copybook) and inserting

the data into an Oracle database: http://www.dev2dev.co.kr/pub/a/2004/06/Bukhari_WLIProcess.jsp

If you download the author’s files (http://ftpna2.bea.com/pub/downloads/WLIProcess_Bukhari.zip) the zip file will have

the copybook format (employee.cpy) and the BEA MFL (message format language) file (Employee.mfl) which shows

how the cobol format was mapped to the schema file.

The zip also contains various *.java files that show the bean files that were created.

The ‘Mainframe Data Extraction’ doc in the zip file contains the tutorial text and diagrams as a Word document.

The Format Builder GUI lets you build the XML tree graphically and can launch a test GUI that lets you test the conversion in both directions.

The BEA Integration Suite is available for free evaluation (as is all of Oracle’s products) on the Oracle edelivery site at http://edelivery.oracle.com/ if anyone is interested in trying the tool.

I can also email some screenshots if there is any interest.

Rick