Specifying special characters to model a message

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

You can specify a special character value in one of the following ways:

  1. As a literal string of one or more characters.
  2. As a mnemonic value.
  3. As a combination of both mnemonics and literals.

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

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, type
Group Terminator This is a string that indicates that the end of a group or complex type within a message Message set, type
Tag Data Separator This is the string that is used to separate a tag from its data. Message set, type
Delimiter This is the string used to separate data elements from one another Message set, type
Repeating Element Delimiter This is the string used to separate repeating data elements from one another Type member

Therefore, if you create a complex type and set 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 (:).

Related concepts
Message modeling
The message model
TDS format: Relationship to the logical model
Related tasks
Developing message models
Working with message model objects
Related reference
Message model reference information
Message model object properties
Additional MRM domain information
Additional TDS information
Message characteristics