User manual BUSINESS OBJECTS DATABASE PREP 18 A GUIDE TO INPUT AND OUTPUT FILES

[. . . ] Database Prep A Guide to Input and Output Files Database Prep Edition 18 September 2006 Contact information Contact us on the Web at http://www. firstlogic. com/customer If you find any problem with this documentation, please report it to Business Objects in writing at documentation@businessobjects. com. Copyright Patents Copyright © 2006 Business Objects. patents, which may cover products that are offered and sold by Business Objects: 5, 555, 403, 6, 247, 008 B1, 6, 578, 027 B2, 6, 490, 593 and 6, 289, 352. Business Objects, the Business Objects logo, Crystal Reports, and Crystal Enterprise are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects SA or its affiliated companies in the United States and other countries. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. [. . . ] = DBASE3 Rec Format to Clone (path & file name)= d:\house. dbf Field (name, length, type[, misc]). . . . . . = Gender1, 1, c END } BEGIN Post to Output File ===================================== Output File (location & file name). . . = ap. gender1, Gender1 END } The following table describes each of the numbered components. Component Description Output file name Set up the file format in the Create File for Output block and the content in the Post to Output File block. The link between the block files is that they both refer to the same output file name. This entry serves the same purpose as the database-type parameter that you place in a definition file. It tells the software which database software to use when creating the file. To clone its physical format, type the location and file name of the input file. To save setup time, you can also clone the physical format of the input file by using the input file location and file name. Each parameter specifies the format of one output field; copy and paste the parameter to create as many parameters as you need. Notice that these entries look like format file or delimited format entries. In effect, you're writing a format file for a database that doesn't yet exist. To save setup time, the software can automatically copy the content (data) from an input file to an output file. Notice that each Copy parameter in the Posting block corresponds to a Field parameter in the Create File for Output block. Database type Cloning Manual formatting Copy input data Manual posting Chapter 7: Output files 63 Set the format of an output database To set the format of an output database, you can either clone, clone and append, or define your own format. Clone Using the cloning feature can save you time when you want to carry over all input fields to the output file. The software creates your output file with the same fields, lengths, and data types as an existing file. For example, when you run ACE, you can clone the format of the (one) input database. To clone, you turn on a parameter in the Create Output File block inside the ACE job file. Notice that the Clone parameter uses the word "copy" instead of "clone. " Other software programs accept more than one input file, so cloning is just a little more complex because you must tell the program which database's format you want to clone. To clone an existing file's format, enter that file's name and location. The following example shows DataRight Views. The database named here--the one whose format you clone--does not have to be one of the databases that was input for the job. It could be a master database, some kind of template, or perhaps a file from a previous job. You must provide a definition file and format file for the file to be cloned. If the master database has a format or file type that is different from the input databases for this job, see "Convert database types and format" on page 71 for tips and details on converting database types. [. . . ] For Unicode data: This function is based on the character position, not the position of the byte or the word. span(char, char) This function returns, as a numeric value, the index of the last character in string 1 that is present in string 2. For Unicode data: The value returned is the character position, not the byte position or the word position. substr(char, start [, length]) This function extracts a substring from the character expression, beginning at character position start (a number) and continuing to the end, unless you specify a numeric length. For Unicode data: This function is based on the character position, not the position of the byte or the word. translated() New because of Unicode functionality. This expression returns the number of non-Latin-1 characters that are converted to Latin-1 with the Unicode to Latin-1 table. unassigned() New because of Unicode functionality. [. . . ]