Export Fixed Length Files

Export Fixed Length Files	Applies To
	OS: VB:	NT, 9x, 2000 5, 6

Download... (32 kb)

One of the most annoying tasks a programmer must face is to output files in various formats. Most of the time, these formats are fixed lengths file formats. Many institutions (mostly financial, medical and insurance) use a variety of these because they rely on mainframes that have served them well over the years.

To us, VB programmers, this means endless tinkering with field lengths, padding, formatting, etc… I finally got sick of it and wrote a class that handles all this and more. You simply specify the columns & their properties, header & footer (if apply), hand me a Recordset, name of the output file and voila - the class does the rest.

In all, the class provides the following features:

Right or Left justify of fields
Leading zeroes
On the fly formatting - i.e. you provide the format in the style of VB's Format function
Optional spaces after fields
Event notification for output progress
Footer/Header
Include column headings
Change Row separator from Carriage Return to anything you want.
Hooks are in for VBScript to format/change each field, but not implemented yet.
Works off an ADO Recordset (either ClientSide or ServerSide). Event notifications on progress are provided only for ClientSide for obvious reasons.

Configuring the class is extremely easy. Just provide it with column information and you are just about done:

.AddColumn "iAlign_no", 5, 0, Justify_Right, True, ""
.AddColumn "szNoteText_tx", 35, 0, Justify_Left, False, "", ""
.AddColumn "sLastUpdate_id", 16, 0, Justify_Left, False, "", ""
.AddColumn "dtLastUpdate_dt", 20, 0, Justify_Left, False, "mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss", ""
.AddColumn "iConcurrency_id", 5, 0, Justify_Left, False, "", ""

Included in the download is a demo program that demonstrates the functionality, as well as a sample Access database that I used to test the class. To start the demo, download, start demo.vbp, then press the Run button. Enjoy.

Download... (32 kb)