When sending records from FilePublisher with Packed Decimal fields (COMP-3), the message item description must set the type to either COMP-3 or PACKED. The packed data is automatically converted to 8-byte floating point DOUBLE on the wire, unless the convertToString option is used. A convertToString="true" causes the packed data to be converted in to a DISPLAY format, sent as STRING on the wire. This avoids any loss of precision and rounding that can occur if FLOAT is used to represent decimal numbers. Sample definitions are shown below: