Types
Each value in a payment is referred to as a “field”. A field must be one of the following formats:
| Types Used in Fields |
Description |
|---|---|
| A – alphabetic | An alpha field contains a sequence of the characters a-z in upper or lower case. |
| N – Numeric | A numeric field contains a sequence of the digits 0-9. It may not contain a negative sign ‘-’ or a period ‘.’ |
| AN – Alpha Numeric | An alpha numeric field contains a sequence of the digits 0-9 and the characters a-z in upper or lower case. |
| format+(char_1, char_2…char_n) | The given format plus the space, dash and exclamation mark characters. For example, AN+(s, -, !) is alpha numeric plus the space, dash and exclamation mark. |
| TS - Timestamp | All timestamps should be the current time in Coordinated Universal Time, rather than the local time for a particular server. Since UTC is the same timezone as GMT (which has the timezone code Z) it is often called Zulu time in military and aviation communications. Timestamps should contain the complete date and time, including seconds. They should be formatted according to the W3C Note on date and time formats for use on the web. The format is: YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD. For example, 6:03 pm on Jan 17, 2006 could be formatted as: 2006-01-17T22:18:03Z. |
| T – Text | A text field contains a sequence of characters in the Unicode decimal code point ranges 32 to 126 and 160 to 255 (almost identical to the ASCII characters in the same ranges). Broadly speaking, these are the digits 0-9, the characters a-z in upper or lower case, the punctuation characters as well as extended Latin characters such as “umlaut A” (Ä). Note that only internal spaces will be preserved. In the case of text fields containing descriptive data such as addresses and names rather than reference numbers, code point values above 255 are mapped to the closest base character if possible. So Š will become S. |
| One Of | A field specified as ‘One Of’ contains only ONE of the values listed as permissible |
| B – Boolean | A Boolean field contains either ‘yes’ (could also be expressed as ‘true’ or ’1′) or ‘no’ (could also be expressed as ‘false’ or ’0′). |
Any tab and space characters before or after a field are ignored.
In some cases the characters accepted by RAVEN are not the ones transmitted to the bank. For example, BACS accepts only upper case letters, digits, spaces and a few punctuation symbols. RAVEN will convert fields to match (e.g. é to E) before submitting data to BACS.