Can I use the For Each process step to go through a text file prior to converting to XML?

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Permalink Reply by Michael Collins on January 23, 2014 at 9:26am

The For Each process step will only iterate through a collection that exists in memory. You would need to first read the lines of the text file into something like a List<string> object using a code step, and put the list object into the context.Properties collection. Then you can pass that list to the ForEach process step and operate on each line.

To run the ForEach step, you would set the CollectionPropertyName property to the name of the list that you stored in the context.Properties dictionary. The ItemPropertyName property is set with the name that you want to use to reference the current item from the list inside of the loop.

For example:

1. You can store the list of text lines as: context.Properties["FileLines"] = ...a list...
2. You can set ForEach.CollectionPropertyName to "FileLines"
3. You can set ForEach.ItemPropertyName to "CurrentLine"
4. Inside of the ForEach loop, you can access the current line by retrieving the context.Properties["CurrentLine"] value.

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Permalink Reply by Don Johnson on January 23, 2014 at 11:37am

Since the message is already on the bus looking like:

1,2,2014-01-20 00:00:00.000,3953,1061633,    XXXXXXXXXXXX8928,0

2,2,2014-01-20 00:00:00.000,3944,1061585,              TXSH 1,0

3,2,2014-01-20 00:00:00.000,6490,1061583,    XXXXXXXXXXXX4853,0

4,2,2014-01-20 00:00:00.000,4126,1061560,           Pickup By,0

5,2,2014-01-20 00:00:00.000,4126,1061560,   Antoine Alexander,0

6,2,2014-01-20 00:00:00.000,4126,1061560,        214-622-7792,0

7,2,2014-01-20 00:00:00.000,4126,1061560,     Guarantee Level,0

8,2,2014-01-20 00:00:00.000,4126,1061560,          15 minutes,0

9,2,2014-01-20 00:00:00.000,4126,1061560,  Target Pickup Time,0

10,2,2014-01-20 00:00:00.000,4126,1061560, 11:44 AM,0

Shouldn't I be able to reference it similar to:

context.Properties["FileLines"] = context.Data.Text;

to make my Properties?

 

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Permalink Reply by Michael Collins on January 23, 2014 at 12:39pm

Not exactly. You will need to use a code step to split the text using newlines. For example:

context.Properties["FileLines"] = context.Data.Text.Split(new[] { '\n' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

or

context.Properties["FileLines"] = context.Data.Text.Split(new[] { "\r\n" }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

depending on whether your lines are terminated by LF characters (\n) or CRLF (\r\n). The latter may be the case.

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