Thank you for the hint,
but this is exactly what I tried in the first place. The problem was to convert EnsLib.HL7.Message objects into objects of my derived class. I thought using a DTL was overkill and I hoped for another, simpler way. I think I'll abandon the approach using derived classes altogether.
Thank you, Robert Cemper.
In fact, I now do something like your line of inline sql: I retrive my messages from the general EnsLib.HL7.Message database using their id. Although I liked the idea of setting up my own table, I suspect this is not how the system is intended to be used.
I surely did not want to mess with The Enslib message class. The documentation also hinted to some (can't judge if dirty) tricks to do this, but I'd rather not risk crashing the whole system...
Instead of subclassing I now use routing of messages by means of their values (message type, certain textual data) to distinguish different messages.
I hope this works out. What is COS, by the way?
That sounds very handy indeed. I will try it for sure, as there is still a small caveat in my solution so far, which could be fixed this way. Thank you very much!