VEdit Alternative for Mainframe Files | DataMystic

VEdit End of Life (EOL)

Before Sublime, Atom and Visual Studio Code, VEdit was a best-of-breed visual text editor. It only pivoted to mainframe files as a last-ditch effort - something it was never really architected for.

If you've been using VEdit to handle mainframe copybooks, you'd know that it's complicated to configure. VEdit's single massive config file has manual record offsets, and cryptic references that result in a crash if not specified correctly. Heaven forbid having to update to support a new copybook version!

VEdit Alternative - TextPipe Pro

TextPipe was architected from the ground up as a sophisticated automated stream editor - with a no-fuss approach to handling massive multi-terabyte (TB) files. This lends itself perfectly to mainframe file conversion.

Here's how TextPipe helps:

TextPipe parses the original copybook definition. No need to copy/paste field names one-by-one into a grid, or to maintain a cryptic manifest file.
Logging includes the number of records processed, and if any extra data was found in the file. This can indicate that the copybook has changed.
Native master-child record handling. This allows files with multiple segments to be easily handled, with each record/segment type being output to a separate file, ready for import with SSIS or your favorite ETL tool.
Bypass your ETL tool by outputting SQL INSERT statements, and push the results directly into your database or staging area, or Azure Event Hub/IoT Hub.
Handles the widest variety of field types, such as packed and zoned decimal, COMP-1, COMP-2, COMP-3, COMP-4, alphanumeric and BINARY.
Handles FILLER, REDEFINES, OCCURS and OCCURS DEPENDING ON, comments, constants etc.
TextPipe's config file uses a JSON file format - so it's easy to inspect or modify in a text editor if needed. This also makes it suitable for controlling versions in a VCS like git.

DataMystic's TextPipe Pro is a market-leading alterntive to VEdit.

DataMystic's consulting team can take your existing copybooks, and convert them to an efficient TextPipe representation. TextPipe is very cost-effective.

TextPipe also allows to to work with plain text files, legacy reports and mainframe data, creating models with floating traps, and moving output data to a spreadsheet table.

TextPipe is flexible and easy to use. It also links well with other data sources. While a yearly maintenance contract that includes professional services is available for purchase, the benefits are dependent on an organization's specific needs.

TextPipe is very effective for data mining from legacy reports and extract data from mainframe reports. Advanced features like Scripting Filters and External Lookups provide users with the ability to augment raw data. You can create a "filter list" to automate the data extraction.

If an organization's primary source of data is available in a report format, TextPipe is an excellent solution. It works extremely well for parsing out data from downloaded text files, and can even be used to parse data out of scanned pdf, Word and Excel documents. For power users, it works very well with databases and SQL. For non-technical users who just want to glean data out of a downloaded report, it's very easy to see how it works. For anyone who has ever tried to use Excel to open and parse a text file, TextPipe is sure to provide lasting relief!

Should you find TextPipe beneficial, the next logical step towards creating a great BI environment is TextPipe Server Edition, and TextPipe Engine.

VEdit Similar Software

TextPipe Lite, TextPipe Standard and TextPipe Pro are all great alternatives to VEdit.

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