Tag Archive for: data mapping

Validating and Debugging Data Transformations


Software developers and other data professionals often need to transform data from one format to another. These transformations can be simple one-to-one conversions or may require more complex manipulation. For instance, relationships must be generated when importing flat CSV files into a database, or source data may need to be split for the target, as in full name vs. first, middle, last, and optional suffix. Validating data transformation is critical to prevent data loss or corruption.

In an earlier post on Web service data integration, we combined a string value for GMT time with a numeric offset in seconds to generate the local time for weather forecasts. We created a user function that performed all the steps required to complete this operation. MapForce includes a powerful interactive data mapping debugger that can easily trace and validate this transformation. Let’s take a look at how it works.

A software developer working on a computer
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Automatically Convert EDI to XML


Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has proven to be a durable business-to-business communication technology in use today with history dating to the 1960s and even earlier. Efficient EDI data encoding reduced transaction payload size and improved data transfer speeds at a time when messages were sent over teletype at speeds equivalent to a 300 baud modem. EDI standards bodies promote wide acceptance among enterprises, and systematic evolution of new EDI formats extends support across industries. EDI improves profitability and is a dominant format for e-commerce data exchange.

Despite the advantages, EDI files are barely human readable and need to be translated and mapped for compatibility with other business technologies. Altova MapForce is a graphical EDI mapping tool with native support for all major business data formats in use today, including XML, JSON, databases, flat files, Excel, and Web services, as well as the EDIFACT, X12, HL7, NCPDP SCRIPT, IDoc, PADIS, and SWIFT EDI transaction sets. MapForce can even automatically convert EDI to XML without the need to specify a target XML Schema or perform any manual mapping.

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How to Debug XSLT and XQuery


Nothing’s more frustrating than getting unintended results from an XSLT or XQuery transformation and having to spend hours tracking down the issue – especially if you’ve inherited the project from another developer or haven’t looked at the code in a few months.  Of course, XMLSpy has long included an XSLT debugger and XQuery debugger for setting break points and stepping through transformations to identify problems.

For a more interactive debugging process, XMLSpy also includes XSLT/XQuery back-mapping.

With back-mapping enabled, you can simply click on or hover over the portion of your output document you want to zero in on, and XMLSpy will immediately highlight the source XML and XSLT or XQuery instruction that is responsible. Let’s see how it works.

Debug XSLT with back-mapping

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Transforming and Converting Protobuf


MapForce supports mapping protocol buffers (Protobuf) to and from other structured data formats as mapping sources or targets. In the constant quest for more efficient ways to transfer, manipulate, and manage large structured data sets, Google has created a language- and platform-neutral data format similar to XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler than even JSON data. Tools are available to generate and work with Protobuf using Java, Python, C++, C#, Ruby, and other programming languages.

The structure of any Protobuf message is defined in a .proto file that defines each field name and value type. Altova MapForce lets users drop these .proto files into a data mapping as a source or target along with any other data, including XML, JSON, relational databases, Excel, flat files, REST and SOAP web services, and others.  .proto files versions 2 and 3 are supported.

A MapForce data mapping creates compatibility between existing XML, JSON, database or legacy data formats and new applications leveraging the efficiency of Protobuf.

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Excel Data Mapping to Update Existing Documents


Excel began life as a simple spreadsheet tool. Over time, support for rich text styling options, built-in charts, and copy and paste formatting features has led many enterprises to create reports in Excel documents. This can cause difficulty when data changes and existing documents need to be manually updated for distribution to a wide audience in the familiar report style.

Altova MapForce, the award-winning, graphical data mapping tool for any-to-any conversion and integration, supports Excel data mapping to convert data to existing Excel documents while preserving styles and formulas in the original.

This feature lets you write directly to nicely formatted Excel files to update data at runtime: any designated worksheets, rows, and cells from the specified file will be replaced with data from the mapping and all formatting in the existing file will be preserved as-is. To protect functionality in the existing spreadsheet, cells with formulas are not overwritten.

Let’s look at an example of how to map Excel data.

Financial pros using XBRL
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Data Mapping with XSLT3 Math Functions


XSLT3 adds trigonometry and other advanced math functions, new formatting functions, functions to collect environment variables, and more, extending XSLT and XSLT2 XML transformation standards. Data analysts and other data professionals can apply XSLT3 functions to solve XML data mapping and integration challenges that require complex mathematical computations. Let’s look at some MapForce examples of data mapping with XSLT3 math functions using trigonometry and other complex math expressions.

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New XML Grid and More in v2021r2


In the latest release of Altova desktop developer tools and server software products, we’re introducing a completely rebuilt XML Grid View, support for XSLT3 for XML data mapping, statistics and charts for monitoring FlowForce Server, and much more. Let’s take a look at the highlights of Altova Software Version 2021 Release 2. 

New features in Altova v2021r2
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