NEON Comma delimited fields with space trimming

This tutorial, although at first seems very vertical and specific, provides a good general overview of using NEON formats with WMQI.  If this tutorial is fully understood, you will be well on your way to utilizing other NEON formats in your WMQI projects.

Logically, the task of this tutorial is to remove white space around fields delimited by commas.

A comma delimited message may look like:

Field1,XYZ,123,Field4,This is Field 5,

The same message with white spaces leading or trailing the fields may look like:

Field1, XYZ, 123, Field4 ,This is Field 5,

The purpose of this tutorial is to convert the second example into the first.

To achieve this, NEON formatting was selected.  When using NEON, one first identifies the input formats and then builds the output formats.  The input format of this message type was defined to be a sequence of individual, comma delimited fields.  The output format was a sequence of fields taken from the input format, space trimmed and delimited again by a comma.

The following NEON objects were created for the input format which was called InputMultipleComma.

Fields

• value

Literals

• COMMA value = ","

Input Controls

• GetToComma; ControlType = Data Only; Type = String; Termination = Delimiter; Delimiter = COMMA

Input Formats

• SingleComma; Type = Input Flat Format; Fields = value; Input Control Name = GetToComma
• InputMultipleComma; Type = Input Compound Format

  Component Formats

  • SingleComma; Repeating = True

The following NEON objects were created for the output format which was called OutputMultipleComma.

Fields

• value

Literals

• COMMA value = ","
• SPACE value = " "

Output Operations

• Default; Name = DefaultCOMMA; Default Value = COMMA
• Default; Name = DefaultNONE; Default Value = NONE
• Trim; Name = removeSpace; Trim Value = SPACE; Trim Type = BOTH
• Prefix/Suffix; Name = AddComma; Prefix/Suffix = Suffix; Value = COMMA

Output Operation Collections

• TrimAndAddComma
  • DefaultNONE
  • removeSpace
  • AddComma
  • DefaultComma

Output Controls

• AddComma; Output Control Type = Data Field (Name Search); Output Operation = TrimAndAddComma; Data Type = String

Output Formats

• OutputSingleComma; Type = Output Flat Format; Fields = value; Output Control Name = AddComma; Access Mode = Access Next Instance
• OutputMultipleComma; Type = Output Compound Format

  Component Formats

  • OutputSingleComma; Repeating = True;

The following screen shot shows the NEON Formatter after having added all the entries:

With these done, the WMQI message flow can now be defined.  A sample flow looks as follows:

The Input Node's properties are:

And the NEON Transform's properties are:

A ZIP file is provided here.  This ZIP contains:

• NEON Strip Spaces.xml - WMQI exported message flow
• neon.exp - NNFie exported set of formats from the NEON database

Last Updated: 04/03/2002