Map architecture

To an extent, the architecture of a given map in IBM® Transformation Extender terms will be influenced heavily by the external formats and expected customer/application requirements when using the map.

For ESQL based maps in FTM, customization is oriented around pre and post body mappers as 'route to label' names. This allows our standard mappers to produce standard output and then a dynamic customization step was invoked to adjust it channel by channel. In ESQL this works well because the integration bus uses a document tree (like DOM) making dynamic post mapper customization easy and efficient. WTX does not have a concept of a document tree, which means dynamic customization steps require additional WTX parse/writes because the maps are not linked at compile time. An acceptable alternative to dynamic customization is compile time customization (taking care to isolate changes from the original map source).

Even with WTX maps – retention of label based pre/post body allows a user to tailor a mapping using non-WTX if required. The integration flows supports this.