In Informatica How to Handle nulls coming from SQL Query and Replace the same length of Column Space in Flat Files

Question

For example I have SQL data like this:

Col1    Col2    Col3
-----------------------
0010    01P98   UA500
0010    NULL    UA500

I need output in a flat file like this:

But I am getting output as below if I use isnull , is_Spaces , ReplaceString etc. functions.

Please suggest some code in Informatica.

Answer 1

You need to use lpad along with isnull() check.

lpad(IIF(isnull(col2),'',col2),' ',5)

This will pad with 5 spaces if its null and if its not null, then it will simply left pad spaces until col2 length is 5.

Answer 2

Although Koushik's answer will work just fine, in fact you should define your output as a fixed-width file and let Informatica do the job.

Once the target is a fixed-width file with proper pors length definition, Informatica will pad the values for all ports appropriately and there will be no LPAD functions required for any of the output ports.