Hi Jon, I didn't mean to run down your idea - of course there is a reason you want to dowhat you want to do. I would still design a proper OO class hierarchy, however, and then providesome form of mapping mecanism between your OO wrld and your delimited world.
If it is with legacy systems that you need to continuously chat (and receive info in the format you mention), have a look at BizTalk: it has nice mapping tools from Flat, positional schemas into more OO-like schemas. I've done solutions where I map EBCDIC positional formats onto my *OO* model for data-exchange, using BizTalk ;o) Why would the company want to move to .NET in the first place? Just for the sake of being on .NET? Do they want some advanage? If the latter is the case, do it in OO, and map to the legacy formats. This is more extensible in the future. -- Ernst Kuschke MVP - C# (South Africa) http://www.ernstkuschke.com On 11/15/06, Jon Rothlander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>The solution proposed is simply silly when you look at the 3Gl's today. So how would you solve it? It's easy to say that the solution is silly if you cannot offer a non-silly solution. >> people shouldn't focus on how to implement a bad solution because >>it's apparently hard to implement So what exactly is hard to implement in regards to a class with properties, which handles this easily? Sounds pretty simple to me and I've been doing that for the past year or so. I have not found anyone that struggle with that solution. My goal in posting this question was to see if .Net had some way to support multiple variables pointing to the same set of memory. That's sounds like a reasonable thing to me. If it did support that, it would save me the time of having to construct these data structure classes. So what solution do you suggest? In .Net if we want to write code out to an ASCII formatted flat file to be loaded into another system, how would you accomplish this if the flat file's character data is positional? Like my first example which listed something like... "First Name Middle Name Last Name " Someone in a previous post asked why anyone would want to do this. Well, that is the data I am given. I don't think I can convenience all of the applications that interface with application that I am porting to .Net, to go in and rewrite all of their systems to support my need that the data not be in this format. I have to handle what I am given. The client's question would be to ask why .Net cannot handle this common and very simple data format. In .Net without any structure to handle this, such as the class/property examples in previous emails, you cannot do something like... String FirstName = "First Name" String MiddleName = "Middle Name" String LastName = "Last Name" String FullName = "" FullName = FirstName + MiddleName + LastName That will not work. You'd end up with... "First Name Middle Name Last Name" That's not valid for the ASCII formatted-positional file format. So you'd have to go in and add a buffer function to adjust the number of trailing spaces. At that point, what's the point! Why not just use the class/property solution, which you say is silly. Doesn't sound nearly as silly as going through all of this extra work to get the ASCII formatted file that you need. Then going the other way, you'd have to read in the data using positional string manipulation such as MID(). That's allot of extra code to add to support something as simple as reading positional character data. Oh. Maybe you mean that .Net applications shouldn't interop with legacy systems that are not Xml compatible or systems that are using non-SQL database such as DB2... which would include most hotel systems, most insurance companies, banks, and most systems written pre-2000. Or should we force all of these systems to upgrade to web services, xml, or sql server so we .Net developers do not have to work around issues like this. By the way, most of these systems are running modern (not dinosaur) systems. IBM is running commercials right now trying to sell these systems... with a new and more modern name. Most of these systems are running Windows as well. So the clients that I am working with want to port the legacy systems into the Windows partition and work with .Net going forward. However, right now the best solutions port to a Java partition and run them in WebSphere. IBM seems to have a pretty big service for this, so apparently they don't think it's silly to find a solution for this. =================================== This list is hosted by DevelopMentor(r) http://www.develop.com View archives and manage your subscription(s) at http://discuss.develop.com
-- Ernst Kuschke MVP - C# (South Africa) http://www.ernstkuschke.com =================================== This list is hosted by DevelopMentor® http://www.develop.com View archives and manage your subscription(s) at http://discuss.develop.com
