The Data Conversion Engine

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the following key points:

• Data is the lifeblood of an organization, and the success of an organization depends on the quality of the data it possesses. Data related to securities, prices, market conditions, clients, and trades is used by various trading applications for the fulfillment of trades. Data comes from a variety of sources, and this leads to a data conversion problem where data taken from one system needs to be migrated to another.

• We illustrated the power of XML and how it can act as the glue in enabling data integration among heterogeneous systems.

• We covered the XML classes in the .NET Framework that allow the parsing, reading, and writing of XML documents.

• We explained the benefit of XSD and how it can be used to define and validate the structure of an XML document.

• We provided a basic overview of the declarative style of programming and howit is being leveraged by the XML serializer to convert in-memory objects to XML representation formats.

• We designed a data conversion framework that is built upon XML and supports the conversion of an unstructured text file format to XML format.