‘Continue’ in XML xlates…

[David Gordon]

Noticed some odd behaviour in 5.4 rev 1.  If you have an XML message that has the following basic structure:

{

HEADER

[{LINE ITEM}]

}

So a repeating set of header records with one or more line items.  If you want to break this into individual messages, you should be able to just iterate over the headers with CONTINUE/SUPPRESS like normal, right?

However, with XML, it seems that the CONTINUE command does not actually send a message, nor does SEND.  It just appends on to one message, so if you have a scenario where your data looks like this:

HEADER1

LINE1

LINE2

LINE3

HEADER2

LINE1

Instead of getting the following two messages:

HEADER1

LINE1

LINE2

LINE3

HEADER2

LINE1

You get:

HEADER1

LINE1

LINE2

LINE3

HEADER2

LINE1

LINE2

LINE3

Not only do you not get two messages, the second header has the leftover records from the first…  

Looks like a bug, but I can’t think of another simple way to split these XML files into individual messages.

Has anyone had any experience with this?

Topic

[Nathan Martin]

1. The previous message data/segments always show up in the next message unless you @null them out or delete them somehow.  (I suppose with the right proc you could save a copy of the default message, then restore it after every send, but i haven’t done that.)

2. Seems like SEND should really be sending new messages.  Are you sure those messages aren’t just being appended in the output file or something like that?

[David Gordon]

1.  Generally if use suppress that doesn’t seem to be an issue, or at least I’ve never noticed it.

2.  Positive, it just appends new XML records into the current message.  I guess ‘CONTINUE/SEND’ inside a translate with an XML destination is borked.   Damn.

[Nathan Martin]

I looked through the archives.

Here is an example of somebody clearing out the whole message (which was overkill because it was clearing out the common message details) but you get the picture.

https://usspvlclovertch2.infor.com/viewtopic.php?t=1436&highlight=suppress” class=”bbcode_url”>https://usspvlclovertch2.infor.com/viewtopic.php?t=1436&highlight=suppress

It’s likely your previous Xlates just copied over the per-message data every time.  I think that assuming the per-message segments and fields will be automatically reset is a common, possibly dangerous, mis-understanding about SEND/SUPPRESS.  Initially I also thought it would reset by itself…  It looks declarative and magical, but xlate actions perform in a procedural way.  How would it know which parts of the global output message you’d want to reset?  There are no BOOKMARK, FREEZE, RESET, or equivalent actions provided.

Also, here is a post that suggests the testing tool may sometimes display multiple messages as one message.

https://usspvlclovertch2.infor.com/viewtopic.php?t=391&highlight=suppress” class=”bbcode_url”>https://usspvlclovertch2.infor.com/viewtopic.php?t=391&highlight=suppress

Good luck,

Nathan

[Author]

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