Kick-starting our development blog again, we’re going to highlight some recent enhancements we made to the wizard for importing delimited text. This wizard is a staple to our product suite – it allows users to import data for filtering, linking, re-packaging and various quality control purposes.
In prior versions, during the import process, you would specify the field from your CSV/DAT file that would “link on” to the document identifier in the grid. We did not provide a method for you to change the field to link on in the data already imported. In the screenshot below, you can see we added an option to specify the “Link Field” – this is populated from all the fields available in the main grid display.
If you’re familiar with the old wizard interface, you’ll also notice we’ve cleaned up the display quite a bit. At the top, you can determine whether you want the wizard to add “new documents” or error if it is unable to link-to existing documents. You’ll also see the “Queue” – this is populated based on the number of documents already in the grid display. In case there is a filter applied, you can glance at the numbers listed there which indicate the available set of documents being updated.
Appending your import to data already in the grid is also a bit more streamlined – you can specify the separator field now. Further, if the value you’re appending is the same as the current value – that data won’t be added, preventing duplicate information.
Finally, one common request we’ve had is to allow duplicate entries to be processed from the delimited text file. In the past, if a document was listed two or more times in your import CSV/DAT file – only the first instance of that record was updated. This was a conscious decision, allowing the import process to read the data in and update the grid faster. We now allow you to decide if you want the duplicates to be processed. Benefit of doing so, combined with the append feature, allows you to keep multiple entries and different updates from your import file.