ServingXML

ServingXML is a markup language for expressing XML pipelines, and an extensible Java framework for defining the elements of the language.

ServingXML currently comes with a console app, and also documents an API for imbedding the software in a standard Java or J2EE application.

ServingXML supports reading content as XML files, flat files, SQL queries or dynamically generated SAX events, transforming it with XSLT stylesheets and custom SAX filters, and writing it as XML, HTML, PDF or mail attachments.

This software is especially suited for converting flat file or database records to XML, with its support for namespaces, variant record types, multi-valued fields, segments and repeating groups, hierarchical grouping of records, and record-by-record validation with XML Schema.

ServingXML works as an "inversion of control" container for assembling components from a variety of projects - Apache FOP, Sun MSV and others - and making them work together to process records and XML.

Features:

• Convert flat files to XML and vice versa.
• Convert database records to XML and vice versa.
• Convert flat files from one layout to another.
• Transform and validate XML with SAX filters, XSLT stylesheets, and schema validation.

What is new in this release:

• The new flat file option "trimQuoted" trims quoted fields of leading/trailing space if set to true, defaults to false (the old option "trim" trims space outside of quotes if set to true, defaults to true.)
• The new element sx:overpunchField supports overpunch fields in flat file definitions, as described in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signed_overpunch Special thanks to Matt Dowell for contributing code. Refer to the documentation for sx:overpunchField in the Element Reference.

What is new in version 1.0.4:

• Bug fixes:
• loadComponentDefinitions(String[] hrefs) fails, fix contributed by Yex)
• Enhancements:
• In previous versions, saxon:xquery could only be used to produce an XML document, now it can evaluate an expression that produces a non-XML string. See the xml-to-parameters example in servingxml-saxon/samples.
• Overrides have been added to IocContainerFactory.createIocContainer for DOM Document and InputStream objects

What is new in version 0.9.5:

• Bug Fix:
• The default flat file readers with no flat file definition (no sx:flatFile element), for csv files with headers, used the byte scanners rather than the character scanners. This could fail for multi-byte character streams. This is fixed. Changes to Element and Atribute Names: (non breaking, backwards compatible, old names still supported)
• sx:subrecordMapping attribute "field" renamed to "repeatingGroup"
• In sx:composeRecord,
• attribute compositeRecordType renamed to recordType, now allows substitution expressions
• attribute repeatingGroupField renamed to repeatingGroup
• In sx:decomposeRecord,
• attribute compositeRecordType renamed to recordType
• attribute repeatingGroupField renamed to repeatingGroup
• new attribute subrecordType Enhancements
• An optional message attribute has been added to msv:recordValidator and msv:schemaValidator. If a message is supplied, that message will be used instead of the XML Schema error message.
• ServingXML now supports mapping spanned System Management Facilities (SMF) files to XML, see the Flat-File-to-XML example "smf". New elements have been added: sx:spannedFlatRecordType and sx:segmentConcatenation.
• ServingXML now strips BOM characters for UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 in flat file readers as Java does not strip BOM in all cases. Legacy encodings and binary input are unaffected. The Flat-File-to-XML sample input file countries.csv now starts with a UTF-8 EF BB BF BOM.

What is new in version 0.9.3:

• This release introduces new elements for validating the fields and subrecords of records with regular expressions, and for taking projections of specified fields of records.
• New examples illustrate how to transform financial data for FRAs and swaps into FpML documents.

What is new in version 0.9.0:

• This release adds an sx:commandSource element, which allows a flat file reader or an XML reader to read from the standard output of a shell command.
• It also adds an sx:commandSink element, which allows a flat file writer or an XML serializer to write to the standard input of a shell command.