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Message Sets: Specifying special characters to model a message
You can specify a number of different types of special character in the WebSphere® Message Broker Toolkit.
You can also specify special character values for message sets, types, and type members. The values that you set for a type override the corresponding values that are set for the message set in which it is defined.
- As a literal string of one or more characters.
- As a mnemonic value.
- As a combination of both mnemonics and literals.
The types of special character are described in the following table.
Special character type | Description | Set as a property of... |
---|---|---|
Group Indicator | This is a string that indicates the start of a group or complex type within a message | Message set, complex type |
Group Terminator | This is a string that indicates that the end of a group or complex type within a message | Message set, complex type |
Tag Data Separator | This is the string that is used to separate a tag from its data. | Message set, complex type |
Delimiter | This is the string used to separate data elements from one another | Message set, complex type |
Repeating Element Delimiter | This is the string used to separate repeating data elements from one another | Local element or element reference |
Tag | This is the string that indicates the start of a piece of data. | Local element or global element |
Escape character | This is the character that is used to allow special reserved characters (such as delimiters) to be included as part of data | Message set |
Quotation marks | This is the character that is used to allow special reserved characters (such as delimiters) to be included as part of data. | Message set |
Reserved characters | These are characters that have a special meaning; for example, escape characters, quotation marks, delimiters, and group indicators, are all examples of reserved characters. | Message set |
Decimal point | This is the character that is used as the separator between the integer and fractional components of a decimal number. | Message set |
{tag1:data1*tag2:data2*tag3:data3}
In some message formats, a special character is specified before each element or after each element, as shown in the following two examples:
:data1:data2:data3
data1:data2:data3:
You can model these formats by using
a combination of the Data Element Separation method,
the Delimiter value, the Group Indicator value, and the Group Terminator value. For the first example, specify Data Element Separation as All Elements Delimited, Delimiter as colon (:), and Group Indicator as colon (:).
For the second example, specify Data Element Separation as All Elements Delimited, Delimiter as colon (:), and Group Terminator as colon (:).