Is there an smart way to write a fixed length flat file?

Question

Is there any framework/library to help writing fixed length flat files in java?

I want to write a collection of beans/entities into a flat file without worrying with convertions, padding, alignment, fillers, etcs

For example, I'd like to parse a bean like:

public class Entity{
    String name = "name"; // length = 10; align left; fill with spaces
    Integer id = 123; // length = 5; align left; fill with spaces
    Integer serial = 321 // length = 5; align to right; fill with '0'
    Date register = new Date();// length = 8; convert to yyyyMMdd
}

... into ...

name      123  0032120110505
mikhas    5000 0122120110504
superuser 1    0000120101231

...

Answer 1

If you are still looking for a framework, check out BeanIO at http://www.beanio.org