Using fixed width textfiles

Fixed Width text files are commonly written by mainframes or large customer databases – they consist of data arranged into columns of regular width filled by spaces, with no separator character. A fixed-width file of suitable format for Intuitive Dashboards might look like this:
  
1  string1  1  1.23  010/22/2005CRLF
2  string2  2  2.009 112/01/2005CRLF
3  string3  3  2.33  112/02/2005CRLF
4  string4  4  44    112/03/2005CRLF
5  string5  5  4.99  012/04/2005CRLF
6  string6  6  12.09 012/05/2005CRLF
7  string7  7  1.22  012/06/2005CRLF

 

The line terminator is shown as CRLF  

 

Each fixed-width text file must be named yourfilename.txt and be accompanied by a format file called yourfilename.format.xml. For example the format for the above file looks like this:
<TABLE Name="TEST" FileFormat="FixedWidth">
<FIELD Name="LineNumber" DataType="Int64" Length="3" />
<FIELD Name="String" DataType="String" Length="9" />
<FIELD Name="Int64" DataType="Int64" Length="3"/>
<FIELD Name="Decimal" DataType="Decimal" Length="6" />
<FIELD Name="BooleanString" DataType="String" Length="1"/>
<FIELD Name="DateTime" DataType="DateTime" Length="10"/>
</TABLE>