Creating the External Add Reference File

Overview

The Add Reference functionality has been expanded. A new feature has been added in version 7.4 that allows the bulk cross referencing of a filed document by using an external data file. This tab delimited file expands the Add Reference feature to cross reference multiple documents based on one or more fields.

Add Reference File Details

The external Add Reference file is a tab-delimited text file. Each tab-delimited column represents a specific Image-Master field, and each row represents a specific document reference.

Field data specified in the Add Reference file will replace the corresponding fields from the filed document and all other index fields will carry through from the filed document. Each referenced document inherits the initial index field values from the filed document. Blank values present in the add reference file are treated literally and will replace the corresponding index field with a blank value in the referenced document.

Certain Index Fields Are Set to Specific Values

A common batch # is assigned to all referenced documents, and is different from the batch # originally assigned to the filed document. If multiple external add reference files are processed, a unique batch # will be created for each add reference file that is processed.

The internal filing date for the referenced documents is set to the computer system date (typically the date the add reference function is chosen), which may be different than the internal filing date originally assigned to the filed document.

The documents added will have their Status set to "New" regardless of the Status of the filed document.

The documents added will be marked Unimported/Unprocessed for third-party integration. The first row is the header row and contains a strict format. For each column of field match data, row #1 must contain the Image-Master field name. In addition, the first empty column of data after all the field data must contain the literal ~HEADER. That literal assures that row 1 is indeed the header and not the start of the data.

Example: Simple List of File Numbers

FILENO<TAB>~HEADER

123456

ABC123

XXD-117

The easiest way to create this from any version of Excel is to: create the header as row #1 followed by the data rows, then use File-Save As, and then type=TXT (tab-delimited). That will produce the structure described in the example.

How to Use

From the Scanning Module, set the source document to be cross referenced by using the Search function and select the desired document from the list.

If necessary, confirm that the selected document is correct by clicking on the [View Document] button after a selection has been made.

Click the [Add Reference] button. The Add Reference Control sub-menu will replace the Main Control menu at the bottom of the window.

Click the [External List] button.

A file selection dialog will be displayed.

Navigate through the file system and choose the desired tab-delimited add reference file.

Select [Ok] to confirm the choice and close the selection dialog.

NOTE: Unless cancelled, the referencing function will process the selected file as soon as [Ok] is chosen. Processing time (even for many thousands of references) should only take a few seconds.

NOTE: To cancel the file selection and abandon the bulk add reference operation, select [Cancel]. No file will be chosen and the add reference operation will be cancelled.

NOTE: If there is a problem with the External Add Reference file (unable to recognize the header, unable to match column with a corresponding database field), an error dialog will be displayed and no document references will be added.

NOTE: Once processing is completed successfully, a completion dialog will be displayed, containing the number of references added to the database and the batch number assigned to this group of referenced documents.