Transformer now offers powerful facilities for working with Microsoft Excel workbooks, allowing financial messages to be created from, or transformed into, spreadsheet data.

Users can automatically create Transformer message definitions from an Excel workbook using its column heading labels and cell data types. Transformer can also incorporate worksheet-level headings and trailers in this message definition. The runtime Transformer is then able to read workbooks and transform the data into, for example, a SWIFT Statement message with multiple posting lines. Similarly the target output from a transformation can also now be a spreadsheet. A new family of mapping actions has been developed, allowing the user to access and control the properties of workbooks, sheets, and individual cells.

Release 3.4 also extends Transformer's powerful Design Time GUI with a new set of screens allowing users to easily define and maintain predicate logic. This logic is used to select from among repeating data components, for example to find in a set of parties the one with a certain role, or the first one which has an address. This can be especially useful when working with advanced FpML messages, which often use complex repeating components.

The release contains many other enhancements to existing Transformer features and also includes the ability to deploy mappings as RESTful web services.
John Murphy, Managing Director of Trace Financial, said: "Each Transformer release gives our clients even more powerful tools to help them work effectively with complex financial messages. Transformer's ability to both create and read spreadsheets has already proved its worth in recent client projects."