concept flat file in category spring
This is an excerpt from Manning's book Spring Batch in Action.
Spring Batch provides the FlatFileItemReader class to read records from a flat file. To use a FlatFileItemReader, you need to configure some Spring beans and implement a component that creates domain objects from what the FlatFileItemReader reads; Spring Batch will handle the rest. You can kiss all your old boilerplate I/O code goodbye and focus on your data.
Flat files are pure data files and contain little or no metadata information. Some flat file formats, such as comma-separate value (CSV), may contain one header line as the first line that names columns. In general, though, the file provider defines the file format. This information can consist of field lengths or correspond to a separator splitting data fields. Configuring Spring Batch to handle flat files corresponds to defining the file format to map file records to data objects.
The item reader for flat files is responsible for identifying records in the file and then creating data objects from these records, as shown in figure 5.3.
Figure 5.3. ItemReader processing for flat files. The item reader first identifies records, and then creates data objects.
The ItemReader implementation for flat files is the FlatFileItemReader class. Several other types work in conjunction with the FlatFileItemReader to identify data fields from file lines and to create data objects, as pictured in figure 5.4.
