Connections > Connection Configuration > Flat File Connections
  

Flat File Connections

Flat file connections enable you to create, access, and store flat files. You can use flat file connections in Contact Validation, Data Replication, Data Synchronization, PowerCenter, and Mapping Configuration tasks. If you select a Secure Agent that runs on Linux, you cannot specify a Windows directory for a flat file target.
When you select a flat file connection, you choose the formatting options for the flat file. When you choose the formatting options in a Source, Lookup, and Target transformation, you specify whether the flat file is a delimited flat file or a fixed-width flat file. If the flat file is a fixed-width flat file, you select a fixed-width format from a list of fixed-width formats that you configured. If you plan to use a fixed-width flat file, you need to create at least one fixed-width format before you select a fixed-width flat file in the Mapping Designer.

Flat File Connection Properties

The following table describes the flat file connection properties:
Connection Property
Description
Runtime Environment
Runtime environment that contains the Secure Agent to use to access the flat files.
Directory
Directory where the flat file is stored. Enter the full directory or click Browse to locate and select the directory.
Maximum length is 100 characters. Directory names can contain alphanumeric characters, spaces, and the following special characters:
/ \ : _ ~
The directory is the service URL for this connection type.
In Windows, the Browse for Directory dialog box does not display mapped drives. You can browse My Network Places to locate the directory or enter the directory name in the following format: \\<server_name>\<directory_path>. If network directories do not display, you can configure a login for the Secure Agent service.
Do not include the name of the flat file. You specify the file name when you create the task.
Browse button
Use to locate and select the directory where flat files are stored.
Date Format
Date format for date fields in the flat file. Default date format is:
MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss
Code Page
The code page of the system that hosts the flat file. Select one of the following code pages:
  • - MS Windows Latin 1. Select for ISO 8859-1 Western European data.
  • - UTF-8. Select for Unicode data.
  • - Shift-JIS. Select for double-byte character data.
  • - ISO 8859-15 Latin 9 (Western European).
  • - ISO 8859-2 Eastern European.
  • - ISO 8859-3 Southeast European.
  • - ISO 8859-5 Cyrillic.
  • - ISO 8859-9 Latin 5 (Turkish).
  • - IBM EBCDIC International Latin-1.
  • - Japanese EUC (with \ <-> Yen mapping
  • - IBM EBCDIC Japanese
  • - IBM EBCDIC Japanese CP939
  • - PC Japanese SJIS-78 syntax (IBM-942)
  • - PC Japanese SJIS-90 (IBM-943)
  • - MS Windows Traditional Chinese, superset of Big 5
  • - Taiwan Big-5 (w/o euro update)
  • - Chinese EUC
  • - ISO 8859-8 Hebrew
  • - PC Hebrew (old)
  • - PC Hebrew (w/o euro update)
  • - EBCDIC Hebrew (updated with new sheqel, control characters)
Note: When you use a flat file connection with the Shift-JIS code page and a UTF data object, be sure to install fonts that fully support Unicode.

Configuring a Locale in Linux for Flat File Connections

On Linux, for Data Synchronization or Data Replication tasks that use a flat file connection, to support multibyte data you need to set the default locale to UTF-8.
    1. To display the current locale, in a shell command line, enter locale.
    2. To set the default locale to UTF-8, see the following examples:
    3. Restart the Secure Agent.