Formatters

Formatters transform data elements into Strings and transform Strings into data elements. This enables the toolkit to send the data as String messages to and from a back-end host, or to a printer, and so on. In general, formatters format context data to present the data to services or to the application logic layer and to parse (unformat) messages received from services or the application logic layer to update context data. In some special cases, a formatter automatically maps between different namespaces.

The Branch Transformation Toolkit provides a rich hierarchy of Format classes to support a wide variety of message formatting requirements, and if the toolkit does not support some specific formatter, users can extend the hierarchy with their own subclasses.