Message types

A message type is a description of a hierarchical data structure. It describes the structure of a structured Message. A message type is used from other scenario elements like Channels and Message mappings to create or transform structured messages. Also some Serializers and Deserializers need information from message types to work. E.g. the CSV reader may use a message type to create the correct message structure.

The following small example shows a message type, which was imported from a database resembling the structure of two dependent database tables.

Editor view of a simple message type

The above structure can be used e.g. from a Database Target channel to describe the target tables.

A message type is described by a tree consisting of nodes which either are structured nodes or simple nodes. In the example above the elements testdata, targch_master and targch_detail are structured nodes, whereas e.g. IDENT and DATCHG are simple nodes having simple types.

Because internally message types are stored as an XML schema, these elements are mapped to element nodes having structured types or to element nodes having simple types. A simple node has a content type like string or int or date which are actually types defined by XML schema (see XML-Schema).

See Message type Configuration for more information how to modify a message type.