Parse Delimited form
Completing the Parse Rules tab

Field

Description

Select:

• Comma Separated Values (CSV) — to indicate that the contents of the file are in CSV format (available as an export file option from Microsoft Excel). Field values are separated by a single comma. Field values that contain a comma are surrounded by a pair of double-quote characters.
• Custom Definition — to indicate that the contents of the file use a character or character sequence to delimit fields, as defined on the next two fields of this tab.

If you selected Custom Definition for the Field Format, enter the character that separates each field in the input record. Enter one of the following

• A single character
• An equals sign (=) followed by a property reference in the form pagename.propertyname, where this property contains the separator character at runtime
• One of the two-character escape sequences \n for newline, \r for return, \f for form feed, \0 for the null character, or \t for a tab character.

You cannot enter an octal or hexadecimal character value here.

Optional. If you selected Custom Definition for the Field Format, specify a character that, when it immediately precedes the delimiter character, causes that one delimiter character to be ignored and become part of the input data.

For example, if a comma is the delimiter character, and you enter a backward slash (\) in this field, input text containing:

parsley, sage, rosemary\, and thyme,

produces three parsed segments. The last segment contains a comma (and no backward slash):

parsley
sage
rosemary, and thyme

To define the escape character as the value of a property reference, enter an equals sign (=) followed by a property reference in the form pagename.propertyname, where this property contains the escape character at runtime.

If you leave this field blank, the system uses a backslash character as the escape character.

Field

Description

Indicate how this parse rule operates at runtime. Select one:

For example, if the first record in an input file contains header information that identifies the values in all the later records, you can choose Build tag list in a first Parse Delimited rule, and Use tag list in a second Parse Delimited rule.

If you plan to validate the page that contains the imported rows and save it as an instance in the database, remember that the tags must identify existing, defined properties.

When selected, at runtime the system ignores remaining data in the input record in the input data stream. If cleared, later processing can continue from the current position.

Field

Description

Complete this array to define the processing for each input field. Enter rows in the order the data appear in the input file.

Select to mark an element as required. If the data on the input stream is exhausted but parse details marked Required remain, parsing halts. Data processed so far remains available on the clipboard.

Enter text to describe this parse step.

Enter the action to take in this parse step. Select:

• Clipboard
• XML Parse Rule
• Delimited Parse Rule
• A function rule in a MapTo library.

Identify the value of a key or value used in conjunction with the value you entered into the Map To field: