scope:

INTRODUCTION

With the introduction of the DSP Maintenance Modernization application, the present information exchange files would need significant modification to their layouts and data. The decision was made to not only change the file layout but to change the way the data is exchanged altogether by using the flexibility and power of XML.

This document will guide the user through download and processing of these files into user‟s data processing systems.

Moving data between computer systems has always been a challenge. Previously, the most popular way to move data was via flat files containing data that is either character separated such as .csv (comma separated files) or fixed length record files that hold data within areas of a predetermined column size. These data files have been used for years to import data into disparate computer systems. These flat data files had one major drawback; they could store data but did not contain any metadata information about the data. Importing data from flat files required developers to create and maintain programs to import the flat file data.

To correct this issue, developers from IBM used a tag oriented format called Generalized Markup Language. This language led to the creation of HTML which is a standard for web page development and SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) which is the ISO standard version of GML. SGML provided all the mechanisms to define a markup language for a particular purpose. It did not constrain the tags that could be used to markup the text nor did it constrain what symbols would be used for the opening start-tag, opening end-tag, closing starttag and closing end-tag delimiters. XML (Extensible Markup Language) was derived from SGML and was adopted by the W3C consortium.