File format conversion and more

Migrate, transform, protect and report file formats.

Overview
CLF/ELF
CSV
Excel
JSON
LDIF
LS-RS-VS
MF-ISAM
MFVL
Text
Variable blocked
Vision
VSAM
XML
Challenges

Mainframe, legacy and other proprietary data types and file formats may be unsuitable for relational databases, data warehousing and reporting environments on today's distributed systems. Conversely, this may also be the case if you are still processing data on or for a mainframe. For this reason, you may need to convert variable block or COBOL index files to CSV or convert text to I-SAM.

XML is also a popular exchange format, but large XML files are not suitable for manipulation or conversion. ASN.1 CDR, LDIF and Parquet files, on the other hand, contain large amounts of information, but are not file formats that many applications can import or process.

Therefore, you may need a way to convert between file formats and data types. You may also need to edit, report on and protect data in multiple file formats - possibly even simultaneously. Most of the solutions available are complex file conversion tools, expensive product suites or customized data conversion services.

Solutions

The IRI NextForm Data migration and file conversion tool enables mapping between common flat file and legacy index file formats, the layout of your records and the data types within the fields. NextForm supports the translation of more than 100 data and 126 File types, including:

CSV

LDIF

Micro Focus ISAM

Micro Focus Variable Length

Line Sequential

Record Sequential

Variable Sequential

Text

Variable blocked

Vision (Acucobol)

VSAM

XML (flat)

 

The NextForm Unstructured Data Edition is an upgrade that extracts data elements from any number (and combination) of doc/x, xls/x, ppt/x, pdf, txt, image, DICOM and Parquet files. find/extract and structure in flat files can. This article explains how to use your license for this edition and the IRI Workbench front-end GUI to leverage IRI DarkShield's „Dark Data“ search functionality along with SortCL jobs (which also support NextForm) to create a reduced (but not associated) report with the values found, which you can combine with similar values in other sources.

The data manipulation package IRI CoSort or in the Data management platform IRI Voracity included program SortCL supports simultaneous transformation (sort, join, aggregate, remap) and exchange (conversion and creation) of the same data and file types supported by NextForm. SortCL can also generate detail and summary reports from these file formats and protect sensitive data at the field level with a variety of data masking features.

These functions are useful for importing mainframe and database migrations, ETL, SOA and desktop applications.

To specify a file format conversion in NextForm or SortCL, simply declare the input and output formats in a script or via the Eclipse-based IRI Workbench GUI. The source specification may contain: 

                    
        /INFILE=/path/filename1
        /PROCESS=CSV

and the output declarations could be:

                    
        /OUTFILE=/path/filename2
        /PROCESS=XML
        /OUTFILE=/path/filename3
        /PROCESS=LDIF

You can also convert between field data types in SortCL or NextForm jobs. For more information, see:

Data transformation > Type conversion

More details here:


Details in the blog:

Blog > Data migration