Background documentation FORMATTED BINARY Locate the document in its SAP Library structure

FORMATTED BINARY (FWV, Fixed Width, Columnar Values) is a possible format of a data stream. As this format is not the default value of the SAP DB Loader, it must be explicitly specified in a load and unload command.

This format can be used to load and unload binary values.

The FORMATTED BINARY format is largely the same as the FORMATTED format. The only difference is that the length of a data record is only determined by the total length of the individual data fields.

Example

customer.data

Position no.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 .....
 

0 1 m i l l e r    1 0 2 7 7 N e w Y o r k       0 2 s m i t h    6 0 6 7 8 C h i c a g o 0 3 k l e i n e r t 3 3 1 8 4 M i a m i 

The data fields have a uniform format.

FASTLOAD command:

FASTLOAD TABLE customer
  cno       01-02
  name    03-10
  zip       11-15
  place     16-26
INFILE 'customer.data' FORMATTED BINARY

Data Fields

The data fields can contain special characters and all have the same fixed length. This also applies to the individual data records.

The assignment between data fields in the data stream and table columns is made in accordance with the <field_pos> position specification in the load or unload command.

Unlike the FORMATTED format, a data record does not end with an additional line break.

Position Specifications

Data fields are described by their byte start and end positions. The first possible byte start position of a data record is 1. Specifying an end position is optional. If you do not specify an end position, the corresponding data field has a length of 1.

The data fields of the data stream can be assigned in any order to the table columns. The order does not affect the processing speed.

The positions do not need to follow each other directly when you load or unload data. When it unloads data, the SAP DB Loader fills any gaps with blank characters.