Text

Text source

The text source let you read data from any text file. It will read every line from the source which can be transformed with a ParseLineAction - this allows you to parse the line into your data object as you like. As you need to define how a line in your file is converted into an object yourself, this source is not as convenient as other sources, but offers the most flexibility when reading text files in a non common format.

Example

If your text file look like this: 1 A 2 B 3 C

You could read this file into a dataflow with:

public class MyTextRow
{
    public int Id {get;set;}
    public string Text { get; set; }
}
        
TextSource<MyTextRow> source = new TextSource<MyTextRow>();
source.Uri = "inputFile.txt";
source.ParseLineAction = (line, o) => {
    o.Id = int.Parse(line.Substring(0,1));
    o.Text = line.Substring(3,1);
};

Please note that you don't have to create the object yourself - a new instance of the object will be created automatically and passed into the ParseLineAction along with the current line. You just need to assign the corresponding fields into the object.

Using dynamic objects

Of course the TextSource also works with dynamic objects. The default implementation uses the ExpandoObject.

 TextSource source = new TextSource();
source.Uri = "inputFile.txt";
source.ParseLineAction = (line, dynob) =>
{
    dynamic o = dynob as ExpandoObject;
    o.Id = int.Parse(line.Substring(0, 1));
    o.Text = line.Substring(3, 1);
};

Using arrays

Your input type could also be an array. If you define an array as input type, you can set the size of the array in the property ArraySize. Because the TextSource does the array initialization for you, this value will define the max number of elements accessable in the area. The default is 10.

TextSource<string[]> source = new TextSource<string[]>();
source.Uri = "inputFile.txt";
source.ArraySize = 2;
source.ParseLineAction = (line, o) =>
{
    o[0] = line.Substring(0, 1);
    o[1] = line.Substring(3, 1);                
};

Text destination

The text destination let you create a text file from your incoming data. It allows you to define how the incoming data object is translated into a row in your text file destination. The text destination has a function that describe how the incoming row is converted into a string (similar to ToString()).

Example

Assuming we have the same input data as above, the following code would convert this data back into a text file.

public class MyTextRow
{
    public int Id { get; set;}
    public string Text { get; set; }
}
        
TextDestination<MyTextRow> dest = new TextDestination<MyTextRow>("outputFile.txt");
dest.WriteLineFunc = tr => $"{tr.Id}  {tr.Text}";

Using dynamic objects

Instead of an object you can use the ExandoObject with the default implementation.

TextDestination dest = new TextDestination("outputFile.txt");
    dest.WriteLineFunc =
    tr =>
    {
        dynamic r = tr as ExpandoObject;
        return $"{r.Id}  {r.Text}";
    };

Using arrays

This is the code for writing a string array input type into a file.

TextDestination<string[]> dest = new TextDestination<string[]>("outputFile.txt");
dest.WriteLineFunc = tr => $"{tr[0]}  {tr[1]}";