RXMap field from collectors

Question

Hi,
I am trying to understand better how RXMap field works in terms of
structure. It seems a field or structured variable which keeps other
fields which are usually parsed from event sources data. Well, that is
my understand.
I have tried to search it on so many .js files of native collectors but
I did not get its structure.
Does anybody have more detail about it or have played with RXMap
before?
I need to understand that because for some reason, some string data is
truncated to 255 characters when it is stored on RXMap (I guess). I
created a simple and custom collector and add more than 255 characters
to e.fn field and it worked fine. When I use some collectors which use
RXMap field,, e.fn (FileName) is truncated.
Regards
HH
hugohigashi
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Answer 1

Hi Hugo,
RXMap is a bit of an artificial construct. Basically we get an object
back from the Connector called ConnectorData, but it's a Java object, so
we have to unpack it in some way. The first thing we do is attach it to
the 'rec' object, which is a Javascript object. Next, we iterate through
the various fields that come back from the Connector (we basically get a
map of data back). There are really two types of fields that come back:
1) Event data
2) Metadata
and two different ways that the Connector will treat the event data:
1) As a single string
2) As a set of fields
Some examples: the Database Connector creates an output metadata field
called "s_Database" that indicates the name of the database that the
data was retrieved from. It also gets event data back from the various
columns, and can either place each field into a separate variable (a
map) or can concatenate them into a long string. The File Connector only
retrieves line-by-line string data and sets a single event data field
with that line of data.
The problem is that the Connector just sets all this stuff at the root
level of the connectorData object, which introduces some problems. First
of all, there's the potential for name conflicts - if a database
happened to have a column called s_Database, it would conflict with the
metadata field of the same name. For that reason the Database Connector
allows you to specify a prefix to put in front of each column name
retrieved from the database.
So what we decided to do when we unpack the Java object and put the
individual fields into the 'rec' object was to enforce a better
separation of data and metadata. For Connectors operating on lines of
data, what you'll see is all the metadata in the root of 'rec', and a
single special variable rec.s_RXBufferString which contains the line of
data. For Connectors operating on maps of data, you'll see the same
metadata in the root of 'rec' but all the actual event data stored under
a rec.RXMap hash.
Note that RXMap doesn't have any particular structure or class, it's
literally just a hash of data in whatever form it arrived in from the
Connector. So really what you find in there is entirely dependent on the
event source and the Connector.
DCorlette
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