I believe you and Jim are actually disagreeing. Jim is saying he's still optimistic that this transformation, even though complex, can be expressed directly in DFDL. You are saying this would require XSLT or a Java program or whatever to do it.

Mike you say you are aware of 19 such legacy formats, and I bet there are more. Well IBM's broker has no specific support for any of these, nor have we been asked to incorporate them into our message model. Maybe we should play the percentages game - if we see enough different subsystems that use the same cryptic format then it becomes worth building the support into DFDL.

Ascential supports 6 or 7 of these formats today. Batch systems will encounter this more than online. You get them when a mainframe job writes out a tape on a mainframe, and then you read that tape on a unix tape drive either directly or first into a file. Alternatively, you pick up a mainframe file via FTP or some such and directly operate on it on other systems. Mainframe software handles all the VS block and and such stuff in the lower layers as you know (not to mention the tape label) unix software does none of this, you just get the raw bytes. My point is not as much about these 19 or more particular formats, but the issue of how much complexity we go after. In the past we've looked at things like logical arrays with run-length-encoded representations and the suggestion has been there that DFDL might be able to directly express this transformation without need to go outside DFDL. I've come to believe there are certain limits to this complexity and I think perhaps tree-shape compatibility is at the core of them. Building a DFDL description for data that ultimately requires an LR(k) sophistication parser to correctly interpret the data is clearly a non-starter it seems. Where this line is drawn is important. ...mikeb ...mikeb