source.toString

Use when: You want to read values from the original incoming message before any mapping changes. If you need the modified message during mapping, use message.toString.

All other message types

Signature: source.toString()

Returns: String sourceString - the message value as a string

Get the message value as a string.

Note

This method only applies to the following formatted messages: HL7, ASTM, CSV, DICOM, EDIFACT, Old Fxd Width, Fxd Length, ISO 8583, JSON, Text, X12, XML.

Parameters

None

Example

// Convert the source message to its string representation.
var sourceString = source.toString(); // expected: String representation of the message

Binary message types

Signature: source.toString()

Returns: String sourceString - the source message as a string

Get the entire source message as a string, decoded with the message type's encoding.

Note

Use this to hold a PDF, image, or other non-text payload in the channel or message cache, which store strings only, and rebuild the exact bytes later. This works only with a single-byte encoding such as ISO-8859-1; a plain text payload simply comes back as readable text.

Note

This returns the same result as source.getNode('/').

Parameters

None

Example

// Example 1: Hold the received PDF, image, or other non-text payload in a cache and rebuild the exact bytes later.

// A byte-for-byte string requires a single-byte character set, e.g. ISO-8859-1, which is the default encoding for a Binary message.
var originalBytesAsString = source.toString();

// The channel and message caches store strings only, so the payload has to travel as one.
messageCache.setValue('originalBytesAsString', originalBytesAsString);

// ...in a later node...
var cachedBytesAsString = messageCache.getValue('originalBytesAsString');
message.setBytes(new java.lang.String(cachedBytesAsString).getBytes('ISO-8859-1')); // the original received bytes, unchanged

// Example 2: Read a plain text byte array in a Binary channel.

// When the bytes really are text, the decoded string is human-readable
var textPayload = source.toString(); // e.g. "Some plain text here."

if (StringUtils.isBlank(textPayload)) {
    qie.warn('The received payload is empty or only whitespace.');
}