I'm dealing with XML input and I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle the case when a field will have multiple values. For input like:
The field "bar" on foo has two distinct values. The default behavior for the xml reader is that one of these is read in. I found that if I specify a mapping like this:
And then tokenize the input on the join sequence, in this case @!@, I can get back the multiple input values for the field bar.
Is there a better way to handle this situation?
<foo>
<bar>some data</bar>
<baz>some baz data</baz>
<bar>some different data</bar>
</foo>
The field "bar" on foo has two distinct values. The default behavior for the xml reader is that one of these is read in. I found that if I specify a mapping like this:
<Mapping xpath="string-join(bar/text(), '@!@')" cloverField="bar"/>And then tokenize the input on the join sequence, in this case @!@, I can get back the multiple input values for the field bar.
Is there a better way to handle this situation?
-
I was hoping for a solution that didn't require me to do a split on the input...
String aDataList = aRecord.getField(aFieldName).getValue().toString();
for (String aData : aDataList.split("@!@")) {
// do something here
}
I'd rather have code like
List aList = (List) aRecord.getField(aFieldName).getValue();
for (Object aObj : aList) {
String aData = (String) aObj;
// do something;
}
Being able to get the data out as a list, rather than having to rely on splitting on a token is a lot safer. While it's unlikely that @!@ would ever be in the input, it *is* possible. It's just a hack that'd I'd rather not have to do.
I thought about implementing a ListDataField extending from DataField, but I noticed there's a lot of serialization stuff in the DataField that I was not aware of. I'll have to dig into the code more to understand what's going on with that a little better. There's also the issue of not being able to add a new field time to the DataFieldFactory, which makes it difficult to use a ListDataField if I did manage to get it implemented. -
I'm not sure. So what if foo looks like:
<foo>
<bar>0</bar>
<bar>1</bar>
<bar>2</bar>
<baz>fake</baz>
<biz>data</biz>
</foo>
If i'm routing the record to different n different ports, where n is the number of times a field is repeated, do the other fields, baz and biz in this case, get copied to each port? Also, would you have to know ahead of time what n so you can route things in your graph appropriately?
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