Configuration

The Configuration tab has the following fields.

Field

Description

Name

The name to appear as the label for the resource.

Description

Short description of the shared resource.

Format Type

The type of formatting for the text. The text can be either "Delimiter separated" or "Fixed format".

In delimiter-separated text, each column is separated by a delimiter character, specified in the Col Separator field. Each line is separated by the character specified in the Line Separator field. For more information, see Delimiter Separated Fields.

In Fixed format text, each column occupies a fixed position on the line. For fixed format text, you must specify the Fill Character, the line length, and the column offsets. For more information, see Field Offsets.

Col Separator

This field specifies one or more separator characters between columns when "Delimiter separated" is specified in the Format Type field.

When rendering text, each element in the input data schema is separated by the column separator in the output text string. If more than one character is specified in this field, the Render Data activity places the entire string specified in this field between each column. For example, if ":;" is specified in this field, then ":;" appears between each column in the rendered string.

When parsing text, each column becomes an element in the output data schema. If more than one character is specified in this field, the Parse Data activity uses the rule specified in the Col Separator Parse Rule field to determine how to parse the data.

Col Separator Parse Rule

Specifies the rule to use for multiple column separator characters when parsing data. The choices are the following:

  • Treat all characters as entered as a single column separator string

    The characters entered into the Col Separator field are treated as a single string that acts as a separator. For example, if the specified Col Separator is ":;", then Apple:;Orange:;Pear is treated as three columns.

  • Treat each character entered as a potential column separator

    Any of the characters acts as a column separator. For example, if the specified Col Separator is ":;", then Apple;Orange:Pear is treated as three columns.

Line Separator

Specifies the character(s) that determine the end of each line. This field allows you to define a custom line separator. By default, new line, carriage return and line feed are defined and can be selected from the drop down list.

When parsing text, each line is treated as a new record in the output data schema. When rendering text, each data record is separated by the line separator character in the output text string.

The last line in your input file must be terminated by the specified line separator.

Note: ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks does not support specifying the line separator as part of the data.

Fill Character

When processing fixed format columns, this is the type of character that is used to fill the empty space in a column and between columns. This is only available when "Fixed format" is specified in the Format Type field. This fill character is only used by the Render Data activity.

You can select one of the following for this field:

  • Space — fills with a space

  • Dash — fills with a dash

  • Others — allows you to specify your own custom fill character in the Fill With field.

For example, you have a column that holds an integer and the specified width is 10. One row has the value "588" for that column. Because the width of 588 is three and the column width is 10, the remaining 7 characters are filled with the specified fill character.

Fill With

This field is only available when Others is selected in the Fill Character field. This field specifies the fill character to use to pad unused characters in fixed-width columns.

Only one character can be specified. The first character is the fill character and any other characters specified in this field are ignored.