MessageObjects Tutorial
I. Introduction
What is S.W.I.F.T.?
Society for Worldwide International Financial Telecommunication
See www.swift.com
Financial transactions are described by standardised
structured message types containing field identifiers
("tags") and which follow construction rules
such as mandatory or optional field, repetitive sequences,
etc.
What is XML?
eXtensible Markup Language, derived from SGML as is
HTML. Where HTML is used for document layout, XML is
used for data description.
See www.w3.org/xml
XML documents contain nodes identified by node names.
If a data type dictionary (DTD) or Schema exist for
the XML document, then rules can be defined such as
mandatory or optional nodes, repetitive sequences, etc.
What is MessageObjects?
Obviously there are similarities in the structure of
SWIFT messages and of XML documents.
One of the problems of handling SWIFT messages is that
the rules are hard to interpret and the format needs
to be analysed and programmed with great effort. It
is especially difficult to identify the correct branch
of a message and extract relevant data for processing.
Also the correct syntactical construction of SWIFT messages
is difficult and error prone.
MessageObjects is an API containing a library of XML,
DTD and XSLT files with methods allowing easy transformation
between SWIFT and XML.
The great benefit for the user of MessageObjects is
that XML is handled by commercially available parsers
which interpret the structure.
Although familiarity with SWIFT and XML is necessary
to work with MessageObjects, the methods provided hide
most of the underlying technology, so that a quick start
is possible.
Naturally, in-depth knowledge of both SWIFT and XML
will allow more sophisticated usage, such as writing
XSLT to create customised layouts.