Setting up Input Files with Fixed-Length Record Format

Some systems may require fixed-length record formats. As described by IBM:

“In fixed-length or fixed-format records, each field starts and ends at the same place in every record. A data file that contains data records of equal and constant length might be organized as follows.

Sample file with fixed-length records: aaabbbbcccddddggghhhh

The data file illustrated previously has three records. Each record has a field of three characters followed by a field of four characters, so the total record length is seven characters. The file does not contain any separation between records; delimiters are unnecessary because all fields have the same length. The VARCHAR data types are therefore always the fixed maximum size of the field.”
Reference: IBM® Informix® 12.10

This option is valid for FPE and FF1 (ENCRYPT and DECRYPT), and TOKENIZE actions only. Refer to the sample policy file FixedLengthFiletransformation.policy in the BDT Sample folder.

Note

If applying tokenization on fixed-length format records, be sure not to add any prefix or suffix to the tokenized output. Adding such a string will result in failure of detokenization.

Example with a fixed-length record format along with EBCDIC character encoding.