Steps tab on the Parse Structured form

The Steps tab of the Parse Structured form looks and works much like the Steps tab of the Activity form, with three differences described here.

You can use all the methods and instructions accepted by the Activity form. You can use preconditions, transitions, and iterations. See Activity form — Completing the Steps tab.

Parse methods

On the Steps tab of the Parse Structured form, you can use all methods available to activities, plus four parsing methods:

• Parse-Byte-Pos method
• Parse-Char-Pos method
• Parse-Fixed-Binary method
• Parse-Packed-Decimal method

These four methods consume portions of the input string, advancing a cursor.

The input may contain record delimiter or line terminator characters marking the end of each line or record. To position the cursor appropriately for the next record or line, include a step that skips over these characters. Examine the input carefully, as files created on Windows and UNIX platforms may follow different line terminator conventions.

For example, if a Windows TXT file contains useful data in 100 bytes plus the carriage return and line feed characters (\n\r) at the end of each line, the second data segment starts at offset 102, not byte 100. Use Parse-Char-Pos method with an Offset parameter of 2 to discard the two unneeded characters.

Using parent activity's primary page

Usually when an activity calls another activity, the primary page and default step page of the second activity would be the step page of first activity. Rule-Parse-Structured rules can be considered special activities, but with slightly different behavior:

If an activity calls Rule-Parse-Structured type of rules using "Apply-Parse-Structured" method, the primary page of the Rule-Parse-Structured rule would be null and will eventually refer to parent's primary page - that is, the primary page of the activity, and the default step page of Rule-Parse-Structured rule would be that of the step page mentioned in the "Apply-Parse-Structured" step method.

Iteration

If creating an iteration in a Parse Structured form, you can select For Each Page, For Each Embedded Page, For Each Element in Value List, and For Each Element in Value Group. These operate identically in a Parse Structured step and an activity step. For details on these three iteration choices, see Activity form — Completing the Steps Page — Iteration.

API

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