IBM Integration Bus, Version 10.0.0.0 Operating Systems: AIX, HP-Itanium, Linux, Solaris, Windows, z/OS


Message Sets: Specifying special characters to model a message

You can specify a number of different types of special character in the IBM® Integration Toolkit.

You can also specify special character values for message sets, types, and type members. The values that you set for a type override the corresponding values that are set for the message set in which it is defined.

You can specify a special character value in one of the following ways:
  • As a literal string of one or more characters.
  • As a mnemonic value.
  • As a combination of both mnemonics and literals.

The types of special character are described in the following table.

Special character type Description Set as a property of...
Group Indicator This is a string that indicates the start of a group or complex type within a message Message set, complex type
Group Terminator This is a string that indicates that the end of a group or complex type within a message Message set, complex type
Tag Data Separator This is the string that is used to separate a tag from its data. Message set, complex type
Delimiter This is the string used to separate data elements from one another Message set, complex type
Repeating Element Delimiter This is the string used to separate repeating data elements from one another Local element or element reference
Tag This is the string that indicates the start of a piece of data. Local element or global element
Escape character This is the character that is used to allow special reserved characters (such as delimiters) to be included as part of data Message set
Quotation marks This is the character that is used to allow special reserved characters (such as delimiters) to be included as part of data. Message set
Reserved characters These are characters that have a special meaning; for example, escape characters, quotation marks, delimiters, and group indicators, are all examples of reserved characters. Message set
Decimal point This is the character that is used as the separator between the integer and fractional components of a decimal number. Message set
If you create a complex type and set the Data Element Separation property to Tagged Delimited, the Group Indicator property to left brace ({) , the Group Terminator to right brace (}), the Tag Data Separator to colon (:), and the Delimiter to asterisk (*), the bit stream has the following format:
{tag1:data1*tag2:data2*tag3:data3}

In some message formats, a special character is specified before each element or after each element, as shown in the following two examples:

:data1:data2:data3

data1:data2:data3:
You can model these formats by using a combination of the Data Element Separation method, the Delimiter value, the Group Indicator value, and the Group Terminator value.

For the first example, specify Data Element Separation as All Elements Delimited, Delimiter as colon (:), and Group Indicator as colon (:).

For the second example, specify Data Element Separation as All Elements Delimited, Delimiter as colon (:), and Group Terminator as colon (:).


ad09840_.htm | Last updated 2015-03-27 19:26:17