Fixed length file format - bean-io

Question

I am reading data from fixed length file.
This is file content:
Joe Smith Developer 075000 10012009
This is the mapping file:
<beanio>
<stream name="employeeFile" format="fixedlength">
<record name="employee" class="Employee" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
<field name="firstName" length="10" />
<field name="lastName" length="10" />
<field name="title" length="10" />
<field name="salary" length="6" />
<field name="hireDate" format="MMddyy" minOccurs="0" length="unbounded" maxLength="8"/>
</record>
</stream>
</beanio>
output:
First Name:Joe
Last Name:Smith
Title:Developer
Salary:75000
Hire Date:Thu Oct 01 00:00:00 IST 2009
The code is reading the file and converting to pojo successfully. Now client needs strange requirement where I am struggling to implement.
From the file content "Joe Smith Developer 075000 10012009" if the last values are not appearing or appearing partially still code should read the content successfully.
Eg: If the file has content like "Joe Smith Developer 0750". Here salary length is 4 but we declared as 6 in the mapping file and there is no hiredate data. Still, the code should read it successfully like it should take a salary as 0750 and hiredate as null.
How can I read this?

Answer 1

The best I can get is to have it assign null values to fields that are missing. The moment any part of a field is present, the whole length of that field must be present in the data. This is the nature of fixed length formats.
Using this mapping file:
<beanio>
<stream name="employeeFile" format="fixedlength">
<record name="employee" class="Employee" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
<field name="firstName" length="10"/>
<field name="lastName" length="10"/>
<field name="title" length="10"/>
<field name="salary" length="6" minOccurs="0"/>
<field name="hireDate" format="MMddyyyy" length="8" minOccurs="0"/>
</record>
</stream>
</beanio>
You will be able to read data such as:
Joe1 Smith Developer 07500010012009
Joe3 Smith Developer
Outputs:
Employee(firstName=Joe1, lastName=Smith, title=Developer, salary=075000, hireDate=Thu Oct 01 00:00:00 SAST 2009)
Employee(firstName=Joe3, lastName=Smith, title=Developer, salary=null, hireDate=null)
But this line will not work (as you know and hence the reason for this question)
Joe2 Smith Developer 0750
You either have to tell the people/company that supply the data to conform to the data specification or you will have to manipulate the data before you can use BeanIO to read the data. Otherwise the data must be supplied in some variable length format such as CSV, a pipe delimited or XML that you can then parse properly with BeanIO