Oracle Document Editor - Defining a custom message (Part 2 of 3)

In the 1st part I focused on the Message Segments, now I will start populating the first segment.

A Segment can have, as seen below, three types of child nodes: Field, Composite (group of fields) and Union (of fields/composites)

When creating a Field there are a couple of properties to define.

In the case of a PFF document you have extra properties, namely Justification, Padding and Format, as seen above.

This will define how an element will be presented on the PFF document since each field needs to be fully populated.

When the field is a String, the common values for Justification and Padding are Left and Space respectively, whereas if the element is a number (Type "Display") the Justification should be Right and Padding of Zeros as to have, for example, "001". 

For the Min Length value it's a good practice to set it to "1" to avoid errors, unless you know the exact size of the values that will/can be in that field (not counting with padding since padding is added automatically to fill the Max Lenght size when B2B transforms a message to your PFF document).

After creating a field you will see a Property window similar to the following.

In the above picture, on the top right there is a textbox for the position of the node in the tree, you can press the round button where the mouse is pointing to automatically set/update the position of the existing nodes.

To change the position of nodes you can either use Cut/Copy + Paste or click on right mouse button and use the Move options.

In the properties window of a Field you can define the level of requirement or even "hardcode" a value.

However there are some properties like type and size, which are defined when creating a field, that cannot be modified in this properties view. To modify them you have to change the view from Guideline to Dictionary in the View menu.

In the Dictionary view you can see all the nodes in your document and edit the properties defined upon creation of each node.

In case you want to validate the content of a field from a list of possible elements you can create a Code List.

And populate it as below.

You may also change the list after creation in the properties tab.

In the final part I will focus on testing and generating the files needed by B2B.