8 Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of Format Builder.

The Format Builder tool assists you in creating descriptions of non-XML data records. Format Builder allows you to describe the layout and hierarchy of the non-XML data so that it can be transformed to or from XML. With Format Builder, you can describe sequences of bytes as fields. Each field description includes the type of data (floating point, string, etc.), the size of the data, and the name of the field. Format Builder allows you to further define groupings of fields (Groups), repetition of fields and groups, and aggregation.

The descriptions you create in Format Builder are saved in an XML grammar called Message Format Language (MFL). MFL documents are used at run-time to transform an instance of a non-XML data record to an instance of an XML document (or vice-versa).