METHOD FOR CONTENT-BASED DYNAMIC FORMATTING FOR INTEROPERATION OF COMPUTING AND EDI SYSTEMS

A method and associated structures for dynamically reformatting messages in a distributed computing environment based upon message content as represented by a description of the input message format and the output message format. An input message received by the formatter of the present invention is decomposed into a canonical format stored by the formatter for further use in a rapidly searchable data structure (FGA). The input message data is decomposed in accordance with an input message format description which describes the content of the input message in terms of atomic data types and structures. An output message is then generated in response to a user request and in accordance with a user provided output message format description. The output message format description describes the content of the output format in terms of atomic data types and attributes as well as functional operations performed to derive the output field value. Related fields in an input message format, an output message format, and in the FGA are correlated by a common ID value associated with each field. The present invention thereby obviates the need, common to prior techniques, to construct a large number of procedures for conversion among any of a large number of input and output message formats. The present invention supports a rich set of atomic data types and attributes including complex, compound (e.g., repeating or recursively defined) message formats as well as mathematical, lookup, logical branching, and user callout functions applied to derive an output field value.