Flatpack

Since Camel 2.1

The Flatpack component ships with the Flatpack data format that can be used to format between fixed width or delimited text messages to a List of rows as Map.

  • marshal = from List<Map<String, Object>> to OutputStream (can be converted to String)

  • unmarshal = from java.io.InputStream (such as a File or String) to a java.util.List as an org.apache.camel.component.flatpack.DataSetList instance.
    The result of the operation will contain all the data. If you need to process each row one by one you can split the exchange, using Splitter.

Notice: The Flatpack library does currently not support header and trailers for the marshal operation.

Options

The Flatpack dataformat supports 8 options, which are listed below.

Name Default Java Type Description

definition

String

The flatpack pzmap configuration file. Can be omitted in simpler situations, but its preferred to use the pzmap.

fixed

false

Boolean

Delimited or fixed. Is by default false = delimited.

delimiter

,

String

The delimiter char (could be ; , or similar).

ignoreFirstRecord

true

Boolean

Whether the first line is ignored for delimited files (for the column headers). Is by default true.

allowShortLines

false

Boolean

Allows for lines to be shorter than expected and ignores the extra characters.

ignoreExtraColumns

false

Boolean

Allows for lines to be longer than expected and ignores the extra characters.

textQualifier

String

If the text is qualified with a character. Uses quote character by default.

parserFactoryRef

String

References to a custom parser factory to lookup in the registry.

Usage

To use the data format, simply instantiate an instance and invoke the marshal or unmarshal operation in the route builder:

  FlatpackDataFormat fp = new FlatpackDataFormat();
  fp.setDefinition(new ClassPathResource("INVENTORY-Delimited.pzmap.xml"));
  ...
  from("file:order/in").unmarshal(df).to("seda:queue:neworder");

The sample above will read files from the order/in folder and unmarshal the input using the Flatpack configuration file INVENTORY-Delimited.pzmap.xml that configures the structure of the files. The result is a DataSetList object we store on the SEDA queue.

FlatpackDataFormat df = new FlatpackDataFormat();
df.setDefinition(new ClassPathResource("PEOPLE-FixedLength.pzmap.xml"));
df.setFixed(true);
df.setIgnoreFirstRecord(false);

from("seda:people").marshal(df).convertBodyTo(String.class).to("jms:queue:people");

In the code above we marshal the data from a Object representation as a List of rows as Maps. The rows as Map contains the column name as the key, and the corresponding value. This structure can be created in Java code from e.g. a processor. We marshal the data according to the Flatpack format and convert the result as a String object and store it on a JMS queue.

Dependencies

To use Flatpack in your camel routes you need to add the a dependency on camel-flatpack which implements this data format.

If you use maven you could just add the following to your pom.xml, substituting the version number for the latest & greatest release (see the download page for the latest versions).

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
  <artifactId>camel-flatpack</artifactId>
  <version>x.x.x</version>
</dependency>