XML Generation
Terms used in this section
Document is an XML file and comprises Records.
Records are of four types:
Master record (one per document) defines a document in terms of data that appears once only such as document number, other party information, activity dates and totals.
Detail records (which you name, example "Product") define other information in the document.
Redundant records are defined with Print Line files to recognize and omit unwanted information (such as page 2 and subsequent page headings and other "between page" information such as continued lines). Redundant records are defined if (and only if) they appear in the middle of other structures such as in the middle of an individual product.
Removal is a function of FTForm Plus and also invoked in Production where an additional step is automatically added to remove redundant records, as part of the Formatting executable.Unwanted records which do NOT break structures may be defined and left to go to the output XML file where they are removed from formatting by deleting them from Layout. This does not add a step to production.
Our recommendation is to use "UNW" as the prefix for unwanted (UNW-Header for example).
Detail records may be absent; example Master-only documents include a registration or a label.Records contain one or more Areas
Areas are data from input. For the PO example, the areas of the Master are the Master itself - taken from the heading on Page 1, the Trailer information from the last page and the optional Header Comments, taken (if they are there) from the lines immediately following the page 1 header and prior to the details.
Areas comprise Fields.
Fields are discrete data, but may concatenate different lines as a single field. The example shows Header Comments and Detail Comments, each being concatenated into single fields.
Rules are fields with RegEx (Regular Expressions) applied to recognize areas. RegEx are selected from a list comprising of Empty, Exact Match, Contains, Starts with etc., as well as the negatives of these. Users can add to the supplied list.