Functions
In MapForce, you can use the following categories of functions to transform data:
•MapForce built-in functions: These functions are predefined in MapForce, and you can use them in your mappings to perform a wide range of processing tasks that involve strings, numbers, dates, and other types of data. You can also use them to perform grouping, aggregation, auto-numbering, and various other tasks. For reference to all available built-in functions, see Function Library Reference.
•Node functions and defaults (Professional and Enterprise editions): These are more specialized functions that let you create and apply custom processing logic to one or multiple descendant nodes in a mapping component. They enable you to process data either before it reaches a node of a mapping structure or immediately after it leaves a node.
•User-defined functions (UDFs): These are MapForce functions that you can create on your own, using various component kinds and built-in functions already available in MapForce (see User-Defined Functions).
•Custom functions: These are functions that you can import from external sources such as XSLT libraries and adapt to MapForce. Note that, in order to be reusable in MapForce, your custom functions must return data of simple type (such as a string or integer), and they must also take parameters of simple type. For more information, see Importing Custom XSLT Functions
•Web service calls (Enterprise Edition): MapForce enables you to make a call to a previously defined Web service (a WSDL-based service or a generic HTTP API).