Flat or binary files

Binary or flat files are files with a fixed data structure. Binary files can be considered as the most compressed format for data exchange. In contrast to other file formats, binary files do not support subordinated collections.

There are several limitations in using binary files.

• Binary files always require a separate file definition (no headline definition supported).
• Binary files do support arrays with fixed number of elements, only.

In contrast to all other external data formats, which are limited to ASCII data, binary files may contain any type of data.

In order to access flat files, a file description is required in the data base or has to be passed explicitly to the Property::openExtern() function. In order to provide an external schema definition, any of the supported definition formats might be used (see Data Exchange schema)

When the flat file contains line breaks, those have to be defined explicitly in the record structure definition for the file.

One might define weak typed binary files, in which case the data has to be provided in ASCII format and records have to be terminated by line breaks.