FlatFileItemReader requires "firstLineIsHeader" method [BATCH-1820]

[spring-projects-issues]

Thomas Hackel opened BATCH-1820 and commented

This very nice functionality was present in Spring Batch <2.0.
It allows to use the BeanWrapperFieldSetMapper without assigning the column names to the tokenizer.

Please bring back this feature, even its possible to get around with an ugly LineCallbackHandler construction.

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Affects: 2.1.8

2 votes, 3 watchers

[spring-projects-issues]

Mahmoud Ben Hassine commented

I am sure there is a very good reason why this feature has been removed but I could not find any context about the history of this removal neither in JIRA nor in Git history. After a couple of hours (really!), I managed to find out how the firstLineIsHeader flag has been removed:

• The FlatFileItemReader containing the flag has been removed in c9efdb0493f8e973c27074bcce6d9997fdafd14e
• The ResourceLineReader which has been added in 8f29cafe4756454d93dc16f8ea652341d9bb40bc and which does not have the flag has been renamed to FlatFileFileItemReader in 9ec2a67a977fc1618a1a5c2e5aa34b8c85896da1

According to the commit messages, these two changes are related to BATCH-863, but I can't find any detail about the removal of firstLineIsHeader in there.

I'm not sure but I guess the reason is probably the case of multi-line headers, for which a simple flag firstLineIsHeader (or firstTwoLinesAreHeader?) is not enough to specify that names should be automatically set on the line tokenizer from the first line (or first two lines? or first three lines?..).