The FieldUtils library contains the classes used by the FieldConvert utility, whose broad purpose is to read in data from a file, perform some operation on this data, and write the resulting data to an output file. A full description of the available operations are available in the user guide.
In general, this consist of three stages, referred to as input, process, and output. The properties common to all stages are captured by the Module base class. The input stage is represented by the InputModule class, the process stage by ProcessModule, and the output stage by OutputModule; all derived from Module. Each of these classes have many derived classes for performing specific functions, and these are known as modules. The class inheritance diagram for the Module class is shown in figure 11.1. The purpose of modules in general is to operate on member variables of the Field struct.
