Synon 2E It's (ELeM)entary, My Dear Watson
UPDATE: 06/12/2025 - Linked to a summary post dedicated to deep dive long form posts. https://leedare-plex2e.blogspot.com/2025/12/synon-2e-technical-deep-dives.html I've used this trick a few times so I thought I should share it on the blog before I get run over by a bus. Often we (developers) are asked to produce or consume data files for integrations with 3rd party systems. Even with the emergence of web services there are still many many times where the preferred method of interchange is file based, typically these are bulk (high volume) transactional exchanges. Think payments between banks etc For the systems I've worked on we have solved this with .csv delimited inbound and outbound files. We have also utilised fixed width files, the majority having old school multi-format layouts with a traditional header, detail and footer structure which has some advantages over .csv. For now, I will also ignore that we could have also provided XML or JSON payloads as p...