Altova MapForce

What makes MapForce Superior to Other Data Integration Tools?

The MapForce Platform is available at a fraction of the cost of big-iron data management products and is unencumbered by baggage like outdated design features inherent in other legacy products.

Data Processing Functions

MapForce provides an extensible library of data processing and conversion functions for filtering and manipulating data according to the needs of your data mapping project. To save time and leverage work you’ve already completed and tested, you can even import existing data conversion code or an XSLT 1.0 or 2.0 file for use as a function library. MapForce also includes a unique visual function builder to define and reuse custom functions that combine multiple operations.

MapForce can handle the most advanced conversion scenarios, allowing you to define rules based on conditions, Boolean logic, string operations, mathematical computations, SQL and SQL/XML statements, or any user-defined function. You can even use an existing Web service to look up or process data in any mapping.

MapForce Data Conversion Functions:

• Data processing functions convert data on the fly
• Mathematical calculations
• Boolean, data, time, number, or string conversion
• Programmatic string and dateTime parsing
• Specialized node, sequence, edifact and db functions
• Supports filters, conditions, parameters, and variables
• Database functions in SQL or SQL/XML

Many of the built-in functions, such as concat, add, multiply, etc., support an unlimited number of parameters, making it easy to perform mathematical manipulations and combine multiple parameters. Aggregate functions allow you to perform computations on groups of data, including count, sum, min, average, join-string, and others. Conversion functions are provided to conveniently parse complex data types.

Functions in the core library are generalized and not specific to any type of output. Using these core functions, you can create XSLT 1.0/2.0, XQuery, Java, C++, or C# data conversion code by simply selecting the language(s) you require.

Intermediate variables are a special type of component that store an intermediate mapping result for further processing and can be used to solve various advanced mapping problems. An intermediate variable is equivalent to a regular (non-inline) user-defined function, and is a structural component without an instance file.

Inserting filters and conditions into a mapping allows you to select data from the source based on Boolean conditions.

The if-else condition in MapForce is equivalent to a switch statement in many programming languages, enabling you to easily control the flow of data in your mapping projects by matching a value to a selected criterion.

MapForce supports transformation input parameters, allowing outside parameters to affect mapping transformations. The transformation input parameters can be passed to the main mapping function created by the MapForce code generator in Java, C#, or C++.

Support for node functions in MapForce means you can define data processing functions and/or default values and assign them to one or more nodes without repeating the same function multiple times - and without drawing mapping lines.

Node functions and defaults are applied at the node level and may apply to one or multiple nodes at once. They are particularly useful when you want to apply the same processing logic to multiple descendant items in a structure to, for example, trim whitespace, enter default values for empty/null values, replace specific values with some other value, etc. You can define a node function or default value for an input or output mapping component, and you can optionally propagate the function or default to some or all children of the node.