The new versions of TextConverter, TARGET Data Processing Suite, and TARGET Application Development Suite have been released. Significant improvements, recently implemented by our development team, ensure even better performance, robustness, and ease of use than before. Here are release notes for release 4.9. All aspects of these enhancements will be explained in detail in coming tutorials.
Flat and hierarchical templates
We did a lot to increase the efficiency of flat templates. I frequently receive questions whether a hierarchical top-level template or a flat one should be used in a particular situation. Though there is no one answer fitting all scenarios, there is a general rule. Use flat templates for all top-level data unless you know that you need a hierarchical one. You would use hierarchical templates when you need to enforce the strict hierarchical structure of your input document. Most input data does not require this level of enforcement.
Footers
The entire infrastructure supporting the extraction of high-level data located below detailed data is significantly enhanced. It’s faster and easier to setup.
Manual templates
The introduction of manual templates notably widens the variety of business document types which can be automatically handled by TextConverter. Did you ever have to process input files with iterative information which should be put across multiple fields in a single output record? Payroll reports are a good sample of such data. Now you can process this kind of information now with ease.
Buffers
The new Buffer object allows you to accumulate and reprocess extracted data prior to outputting it to the output destination. Transposing columns to records and vice versa, modifying extracted data dynamically based on extracted information, aggregation, and many other advanced tasks can be easily implemented with help from the Buffer object.
Cleansing options
Left, Right, Middle, Filter In, Filter Out, Replace, and Extract are now available for input and output fields.
DbConverter
- The user interface is simplified, made cleaner, and more intuitive.
- Positional output is implemented.
- The number of records per transaction is now editable.
Trg, string, and strlib objects
- InStrRev method is added to strlib object, which searches for a sub string in the opposite direction using regular expressions.
- Two methods helping to identify the context of execution are added to trg object: GetComputerName GetUserName
- New string object makes string manipulations faster and more convenient.
Scans
Working with scanned documents is made easier and more precise by adding these new features:
- Automatic cleanup of OCR artifacts.
- New numeric input format ‘Extract’ which allows to extract numeric values distorted by optical character recognition.
- An option to ignore spacing when searching for tags.
Scripted tags, filters, and ranges
All input fields and template properties, which could be customized using regular expressions, now can also be customized through VB script. This feature brings in practically unlimited flexibility to customization of tags, filters, range and skip definitions.
Other enhancements and additions
- The ability to make all output upper case.
- Simplified regular expression syntax for grouping (regexp) instead of (?:regexp)
- Regular expressions can be used when setting up file filters.
- Include and exclude filters for excel files in a batch processing can use an extended format: “index:1,2,5” where numbers are sheet indices in an Excel book.
- Data objects can create hash tables for fast data access.
- EBCDIC input format is now supported.