Automatic transmission of legacy system data

A system for automatically determining the data format of a storage device of existing legacy system, extracting the data, and transmitting the data in one of several predetermined formats required by a service company comprising:

• a) a data input means for feeding seed data to said legacy system;
• b) a Data Locator coupled to said legacy storage device, for searching said legacy system storage device and for storing location (table, record, record position) of occurrences of the seed values in a raw map along with the seed values and the format of the legacy field;
• c) a Map Refining device coupled to, and for receiving the raw map from the Data Locator, for culling out false hits from the raw map to produce a clean map of domain fields to legacy fields;
• d) a Control Flow Analyzer coupled to, and receiving the output clean map from the Map Refining device for identifying key fields in the clean map used to acquire other data which must be acquired first, and for creating control flow information indicating the order of data extraction;
• e) an Output Generator coupled to the Map Refining device and the control flow analyser, for receiving the clean map the control flow information and for creating data extraction steps to extract the data in the required order;
• f) an Extraction device is coupled to the Output Generator, and to legacy storage device, for executing the data extraction steps to acquire extracted data;
• g) a Transmission device coupled to the Extraction device for receiving the extracted data, for reformating this data according to a predetermined format, for contacting a service company by conventional communications systems, and for sending the data in the predefined format.