Reading Numeric fields

Beside digits, Numeric fields can contain separators and dollar signs, among other characteristics. Just as it happens with dates, when you read or create Numeric fields, it's almost mandatory that you specify a format to tell PDI how to interpret the incoming number. The following are the most used symbols for numbers:

In order to specify the format of your numbers, you have to combine them. As an example, in the sales file, the SALES field is one of the several numeric fields. As it is a number with decimal digits, the mask provided is #.##.

If you don't specify a format for your numbers, you may still provide a length and precision. Length is the total number of significant figures while precision is the number of floating point digits.

For a complete reference on number formats, you can check the Java API documentation at https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/text/DecimalFormat.html.

Continuing with our example, you can see that ORDERNUMBER is made of digits, but it doesn't make sense to do mathematics with it. In cases like this, you don't need to define the field as Numeric. You can, however, provide a Numeric mask like #, so PDI doesn't complete the field with zeros or leading blanks.