WebSphere Transformation Extender – COBOL Filler Fields and Item Presentation Types

In WTX, I have a COBOL EBCDIC input with a bunch of filler fields. The Input Type Tree was created by the Cobol Copybook Importer.

I had an ‘invalid input’ occur when I submitted a cobol message to my WTX map. The map failed on a filler item where the input wasn’t spaces, but NULL.

This is apparently valid, but by default, the WTX COBOL Importer will create thsi field of type CHARACTER which the null’s will cause to fail.

I switched the type of the item to ‘BINARY’ (because who cares about filler data) and got an error

“failed item presentation test for TYPE”

Looking into the documentation, I had to ensure that a binary type had a constant value. By default, WTX creates the item with a 0-XX type for the max and min. I changed the value of the min to the max and everything worked ok.

Author: dan

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