About your custom formatter request it is already possible. I just haven’t made thorough documentation on this topic yet.

But what you have to do is implement the FixedFormatter interface (you could extend the StringFormatter and override the asString asObject methods with your validation code). Each formatter will have all the annotated data available through a FormatInstructions object.

The current StringFormatter implementation looks like this and you can access the pattern through the FormatInstructions object:

public String asString(String string, FormatInstructions instructions) {
  String result = null;
  if (string != null) {
    result = string;
  }
  return result;
}

You can use your custom formatter by adding it to the Field annotation like this:

@Field(offset = 50, length = 10, align = Align.RIGHT, paddingChar = '0', formatter = CustomFormatter.class)

I hope that helped you.

Your validation idea is good. I will find a way to implement it in the 1.3.0 release. Feel free to send me your implementation thoughts.

I really like the api and I would like to integrate in the simple mechanism it provides to read field, also my custom validation.

To say: I would like to have a string validator that check that the strings does not contains character like points and such. Or, that a Date is valid and a day 99 is not accepted (while JDK DateFormatter accept it and just updates the month).

I would Like to write my custom annotation, or use FixedFormatPattern that could accept a regex and validate it in the StringFormatter implementation.

What I am asking are not new features but if there is a way to add a custom Formatter. Here we have tried to find some entry point without any success. You have any advice?

Thanks and congratulation for nice work.

http://www.jfilehelpers.com

Thanks for your feedback.

Currently my focus has been on parsing/formatting one single line. I have not dived into a general way for reading/writing larger files.

At the project where we use the framework we have build a, what we call RecordModel as a view on a file.

Each line in our file is recognized by a combination of characters in the beginning of the file.
Ex. We have a line type called A0, because it startes with an A and a zero. We have created the boilerplate code you talk about and it would be natural to have something doing the hardwork in fixedformat4j.

I am still thinking on how I could load a complete file without being to domain specific and your suggestion could be a solution. On the otherhand I would like it to integrate with the fixedformatmanager and the Records somehow.

You get the exception because you do not have the required dependencies for using fixedformat4j.

Fixedformat4j depends on commons-lang and commons-logging at runtime.
See the list of the dependencies here: http://fixedformat4j.ancientprogramming.com/dependencies.html

If you aren’t building with maven, you can download both from here:
commons-lang: http://commons.apache.org/lang/
commons-logging: http://commons.apache.org/logging/

And remember to use the latest release of fixedformat4j as various bugs was found and fixed in 1.1.1:
http://code.google.com/p/fixedformat4j/downloads/list

C:\Documents and Settings\gusaros\Desktop\fixformat>java FixedTesting
Exception in thread “main” java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/lo
gging/LogFactory
at com.ancientprogramming.fixedformat4j.format.impl.FixedFormatManagerIm
pl.(FixedFormatManagerImpl.java:48)
at FixedTesting.main(FixedTesting.java:30)

Thank you.

I have a great, working library that does what you intend on doing with your library. Wouldn’t you like to join forces instead or splitting in two different ways?

Take a look:
http://tinyurl.com/32cybz

And for code refer the original version, in Portuguese:
http://blog.felipecoury.com/jep/2008/02/java-text-import-export.html

Please e-mail me if you think it’s a good idea to join forces.

Best regards,
Felipe Coury.

Have fun!