Hoping that someone has some info on how to parse a xfa file. I can parse csv or xml files just fine, but an xfa one has come along and I'm not familar with the format. Looks like tab delimited body with column metadata at the top.
Anyone dealt with these before or can give me a steer on how to parse them?
I use vb.net but the language of any solution isn't too relevant.
Much appreciated.
Mmm, looks like nobody has a clue. The problem is that .xfa doesn't look like a "standard" extension: after all, anybody can create its own extension names, from .xyz to .something...
I looked around a bit, found, unsurprisingly (the 'x') an XML format with this extension, not much more.
Indicating where this kind of file come from, what kind of data it holds, might help. Or not.
You describe the file as being a simple TSV (tab separated values) with a header. It is quite trivial to parse, with a tokenizer or some regex, so I am not sure where you are stuck.
I think you might be talking about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFA_forms
This seemed to be a page that was designed to deal with that template: http://www.w3.org/1999/05/XFA/xfa-template-19990614
That information should be enough to get the ball rolling. If that fails then you can always analyse the file itself for patterns and go from there. I don't see it being too tricky.
Anyway, I hope that helps.
P.S. If you could provide a link to that .xfa we could probably give you more help.
Check out the Adobe page:
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/xml/index_arch.html
(Adobe XML Forms Architecture, currently 1400 pages)
Let LiveCycle/Acrobat parse it for you.
The original post says the content looks like "tab delimited body with column metadata at the top". An XFA form doesn't look anything like that - XFA forms typically use a *.xdp extension and are XML.