Frequently asked questions, covering functional and technical common issues.

The FAQ is a basic starting point for support and troubleshooting, mostly regarding supported features, compilation, and building issues.

Functional

1. Why the name "WIFE"?

Besides being the English word for the female participant in a marriage, in the context of this project the name is meaningless. It was original chosen just for being an easy to remember word that shares some letters with "SWIFT".

2. Does WIFE support MTxxx?

All WIFE features are implemented to fit all SWIFT message categories, from 0 to 9, including system and service messages. If you find an issue for a particular MT please submit the issue in the tracker.

3. Does WIFE support ACK/NACK messages?

Yes. All WIFE features are implemented to fit all SWIFT message categories, from 0 to 9, including system and service messages. Notice that some SWIFT Link applications append the original message to the ACK message, in such cases the parser will put the original message in the unparsed text object. (please refer to the javadoc for further details).

4. Is validation for MTxxx supported/planned?

The validation component is implemented as a framework. Full MTs validation support is not planned, nevertheless validation for some message types is provided as example.

5. How can i handle a stream of messages contained in a single file?

The parser component expects a single message per call. FIles containing multiple SWIFT messages is not supported. Some SWIFT Link applications are known to use the "$" character as boundary for message separation (notice that the "$" is the only character not present in any of the SWIFT defined character sets). So if you need to process streams, the use of "$" as boundary is suggested and the actual splitting functionality must be cover by your application, passing to the parser only one message at a time.
If more than a message is given, the parser will assume the first one is the message to parse, putting the following messages in the stream as unparsed texts in the objects constructed.

6. How can i parse/retrieve fields inside a tag?

WIFE itself does not support field parsing. For example the Tag object for this tag: ":32A:050902JPY3520000," will be put the String "050902JPY3520000," as the value property. But you can use SWIFT Fields component. With both libraries you can parse and retrieve field components with ease, for example:

SwiftMessage m = (new SwiftParser()).parse(fin);
Field32A f = new Field32A(m.getBlock3().getTagValue("32A"));
Calendar date = f.getComponent1AsCalendar();
BigDecimal amount = new BigDecimal(f.getComponent3AsNumber().doubleValue());

7. Does WIFE works with IS0 7775 messages?

WIFE is compliant to ISO 15022 that replaces the older ISO 7775 standard. We have not tested nor analyzed in depth the ISO 7775 because it has been deprecated for SWIFT message interchanges, as far as we know. If you find an issue for a particular ISO 7775 messages please submit the issue in the tracker.

 

Distribution and requirements

1. How is the source and binaries distributed?

Current version is distributed as a zip file containing source, binaries and dependencies. Binaries are wife.jar and wife-ide.jar (the last one containing javadoc). Dependencies (libraries) are provided with the source.

2. How is the WIFE jar version identified?

The jar file is released with the same name always with it's version indicated in the MANIFEST inside the jar

3. Wich JRE version do I need to run WIFE?

WIFE main package is java 1.4 compatible and is all you need for a production environment deployment. The test package its in a different cvs source folder and requires java 1.5 (because it uses Junit 4).

4. Wich dependencies do I need to run WIFE?

WIFE main package is released with all its necessary dependencies bundled, so you don't need any extra jar file to compile neither run the component.

5. How can I configure/disable logging?

WIFE uses log4j for logging. If you use log4j in your application, you can control the logging of WIFE. If you don't, actually, you can too.
To disable completely logging of WIFE add a line like this to your log4j.properies (or the equivalent to log4j.xml).

log4j.logger.net.sourceforge.wife = OFF

The previous line will disable logging in WIFE, it is recommended, however, to leave log at lease in an ERROR level.

 

Building WIFE

1. I Cannot build the package because some tests fail

Tests, for many reasons, may fail. Sometimes we write tests for features to implement (that obviously fail). So if you want to skip running tests, set the property test.skip to true in the ant command line, like this:

ant dist -Dtest.skip=true -Drelease.name=myRelease

2. JUnit Test Failing

This is probably due to the fact that WIFE build requires ant-1.7 to work (apparently, ant-1.6.5 does not properly recognizes junit 4 tests).
Eclipse (as of 3.2.2) comes with ant-1.6.5 so you must download ant, properly install it and then, on eclipse, go to: Menu -> Window -> Preferences -> Select ANT/Runtime -> Click on "Ant Home" button and select the base directory for ant installation.

3. "junit" tag not defined for ant

If this happens, it is most likely because of some of eclipse (3.2.2) quirks regarding classpaths... To fix this, you must:

A) copy the files "junit-4.3.1.jar", "junit-4.3.1-javadoc.jar", "xmlunit-1.0.jar" that are downloaded by the build on directory "target/lib/test" to the directory where ant is installed or to $HOME/.ant/lib

B) try the rebuild. If it still does not work, then on eclipse, go to: Menu -> Window -> Preferences -> Select ANT/Runtime -> Select Classpath tab -> Select item "Ant Home Entries" -> Click on "Add External JARs..." and add the copied jars.