Representing multiple values in delimited seperated value file - export-to-excel

Currently i'm working on transforming a xml file to delimited seperated file.I was pondering over the idea of representing multiple values of an attribute field..Currently my idea is to represent the values as below:
First Name;Last Name;E-mail id;Description
Fresher;user1;"|email1#abc.com|;|email2#abc.com|";This user joined as fresher.
My question is;Is there is a standard followed for representation of multiple values.?
How is this scenario taken care in common spreadsheet programs available such as Microsoft excel,openoffice calc and lotus notes 123 when imported into .csv file..??
Based on this i want to make changes to my xslt code..
Appreciate any help in this regard..

According to my experiences it is always good to stick to database normalisation standards. There are a lot of information everywhere in the web for further references.
a) When looking in your proposal what I like is to separate each column with semicolon instead of comma. It's easier to import data to any system later especially when you will deal with different (national) standards of number separation symbols
b) However, which I don't like is the 'e-mail' section. There would be a problem in the following areas:
quotation marks are problems- try to avoid them.
don't separate inside e-mail addresses with the same mark as for column separation. Therefore you shouldn't use semicolon there (what I guess- you can have one or few e-mails for each record).
If you can't introduce database normalisation standards I would propose the following small improvements to your idea:
Fresher;user1;email1#abc.com|email2#abc.com;This user joined as fresher
If you provide that kind of data file I think each of vba user would be able to import it to Excel (or any other system) easily and quickly.

Related

Kofax Seperate Main Invoice from Supporting Document without using Seperator sheet

When a batch gets created documents should get separated automatically without using separator sheet or Barcode separator.
How can I classify documents for Invoice and supporting document.
In our project we get many invoices with supporting document so the scanning person has to insert the separator sheets manually, so to avoid this we want to automatically classify the supporting documents.
In general the concept would be that you would enable separation in the project and then train your classes with examples to be used for the layout or content classifiers.
However, as I'm sure you've seen, the obstacle with invoices is that they are different enough between vendors that it would not reliably classify all to an Invoice class. Similarly with "Supporting Documents" which are likely to be very different from each other, so unfortunately there isn't a completely easy answer without separator sheets (or barcode stickers affixed to supporting docs).
What you might want to do is write code in the one of the separation events like Document_AfterSeparate event. Despite the name, the document has not yet been split at this point, but the classifiers have run. See Scripting Help topic "Server Script Events Sequence > Document Separation > Standard Document Separation" for more detail. Setting the SplitPage property on the CDocPage (pXDoc.CDoc.Pages.ItemByIndex(lPage).SplitPage) will allow you to use your own logic to determine which pages to separate.
For example if you know that you will always have single page invoices, you can split on the first page and classify accordingly. Or you can try to search for something that indicates the end of the invoice like "Total" or other characteristics. There is an example of how you can use locators to help separation in the Scripting Help topic "Script Samples > Use Locator Results for Standard Document Separation". The example uses a Barcode Locator, but the same concept works if you wanted to try it with a Format Locator or anything else.
Without Separator sheets you will need a smart classification software like Kofax Transformation Module (KTM). Its kind of expensive. you will need to verify the cost saving and ROI.

Searching a list of keywords from text files in folders

I have compiled a list of db object names, one name per line, in a text file. I want to know for each names, where it is being used. The target search is a group of folders containing sub-folders of source codes.
Before I give up looking for a tool to do this and start creating my own, perhaps you can help to point to me an existing one.
Ideally, it should be a Windows desktop application. I have not used grep before.
use grep (there are tons of port of this command to windows, search the web).
eventually, use AgentRansack.
See our Source Code Search Engine. It indexes a large code base according to the atoms (tokens) of the language(s) of interest, and then uses that index to quickly execute structured queries stated in terms of language elememnts. It is a kind of super-grep, but it isn't fooled by comments or string literals, and it automatically ignores whitespace. This means you get a lot fewer false positive hits than you get with grep.
If you had an identifier "foo", the following query would find all mentions:
I=foo
For C and Java, you can constrain the types of identifier accesses to Use, Read, Write or Defines.
D=bar*
would find only declarations of identifiers which started with the letters "bar".
You can write more complex queries using sequences of language tokens:
'int' I=*baz* '['
for C, would find declarations of any variable name that contained the letters "baz" and apparantly declared an array.
You can see the hits in a GUI, and one-click navigate to a source code view of any hit.
It is a Windows application. It handles a wide variety of languages: C#, C++, Java, ... and many more.
I had created an SSIS package to load my 500+ source code files that is distributed into some depth of folders belongs to several projects, into a table, with 1 row as 1 line from the files (total is 10K+ lines).
I then made a select statement against it, by cross-applying the table that keeps the list of 5K+ keywords of db objects, with the help of RegEx for MS-SQL, http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/t-sql-programming/clr-assembly-regex-functions-for-sql-server-by-example/. The query took almost 1.5 hr to complete.
I know it's a long winded, but this is exactly what I need. I thank you for your efforts in guiding me. I would be happy to explain the details further, should anyone gets interested using my method.
insert
dbo.DbObjectUsage
select
do.Id as DbObjectId,
fl.Id as FileLineId
from
dbo.FileLine as fl -- 10K+
cross apply
dbo.DbObject as do -- 5K+
where
dbo.RegExIsMatch('\b' + do.name + '\b', fl.Line, 0) != 0

Intern Problem Statement for a bank

I saw an intern opportunity in a bank in dubai. They have a defined problem statement to be solved in 2 months. They told us just 2 lines -
"Basically the problem is about name matching logic.
There are two fields (variables) – both are employer names, and it’s a free text field. So we need to write a program to match these two variables."
Can anyone help me in understanding it? Is it just a simple pattern matching stuff?
Any help/comments would be appreciated.
I think this is what they are asking for:
They have two sources of related data, for example, one from an internal database, and the other from name card input.
Because the two fields are free text fields, there will be inconsistency. For example, Nitin Garg, or Garg, Nitin, or Mr. Nitin Garg, etc. Here is an extreme case of Gadaffi.
What you are supposed to do is to find a way to match all the names for a specific person together.
In short, match two pieces of data together by employer names, taking possible inconsistency into account.
Once upon a time there was a nice simple answer to the problem of matching up names despite mis-spellings and different transliterations - Soundex. But people have put a lot of work into this problem, so now you should probably use the results of that work, which is built into databases and add-ons - some free. See Fuzzy matching using T-SQL and http://anastasiosyal.com/archive/2009/01/11/18.aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163731.aspx

Is there a standard format for describing a flat file?

Is there a standard or open format which can be used to describe the formating of a flat file. My company integrates many different customer file formats. With an XML file it's easy to get or create an XSD to describe the XML file format. I'm looking for something similar to describe a flat file format (fixed width, delimited etc). Stylus Studio uses a proprietary .conv format to do this. That .conv format can be used at runtime to transform an arbitrary flat file to an XML file. I was just wondering if there was any more open or standards based method for doing the same thing.
I'm looking for one method of describing a variety of flat file formats whether they are fixed width or delimited, so CSV is not an answer to this question.
XFlat:
http://www.infoloom.com/gcaconfs/WEB/philadelphia99/lyons.HTM#N29
http://www.unidex.com/overview.htm
For complex cases (e.g. log files) you may consider a lexical parser.
About selecting existing flat file formats: There is the Comma-separated values (CSV) format. Or, more generally, DSV. But these are not "fixed-width", since there's a delimiter character (such as a comma) that separates individual cells. Note that though CSV is standardized, not everybody adheres to the standard. Also, CSV may be to simple for your purposes, since it doesn't allow a rich document structure.
In that respect, the standardized and only slightly more complex (but thus more useful) formats JSON and YAML are a better choice. Both are supported out of the box by plenty of languages.
Your best bet is to have a look at all languages listed as non-binary in this overview and then determine which works best for you.
About describing flat file formats: This could be very easy or difficult, depending on the format. Though in most cases easier solutions exist, one way that will work in general is to view the file format as a formal grammar, and write a lexer/parser for it. But I admit, that's quite† heavy machinery.
If you're lucky, a couple of advanced regular expressions may do the trick. Most formats will not lend themselves for that however.‡ If you plan on writing a lexer/parser yourself, I can advise PLY (Python Lex-Yacc). But many other solutions exists, in many different languages, a lot of them more convenient than the old-school Lex & Yacc. For more, see What parser generator do you recommend?
  †: Yes, that may be an understatement.
  ‡: Even properly describing the email address format is not trivial.
COBOL (whether you like it or not) has a standard format for describing fixed-width record formats in files.
Other file formats, however, are somewhat simpler to describe. A CSV file, for example, is just a list of strings. Often the first row of a CSV file is the column names -- that's the description.
There are examples of using JSON to formulate metadata for text files. This can be applied to JSON files, CSV files and fixed-format files.
Look at http://www.projectzero.org/sMash/1.1.x/docs/zero.devguide.doc/zero.resource/declaration.html
This is IBM's sMash (Project Zero) using JSON to encode metadata. You can easily apply this to flat files.
At the end of the day, you will probably have to define your own file standard that caters specifically to your storage needs. What I suggest is using xml, YAML or JSON as your internal container for all of the file types you receive. On top of this, you will have to implement some extra validation logic to maintain meta-data such as the column sizes of the fixed width files (for importing from and exporting to fixed width). Alternatively, you can store or link a set of metadata to each file you convert to the internal format.
There may be a standard out there, but it's too hard to create 'one size fits all' solutions for these problems. There are entity relationship management tools out there (Talend, others) that make creating these mappings easier, but you will still need to spend a lot of time maintaining file format definitions and rules.
As for enforcing column width, xml might be the best solution as you can describe the formats using xml schemas (with the length restriction). For YAML or JSON, you may have to write your own logic for this, although I'm sure someone else has come up with a solution.
See XML vs comma delimited text files for further reference.
I don't know if there is any standard or open format to describe a flat file format. But one industry has done this: the banking industry. Financial institutions are indeed communicating using standardized message over a dedicated network called SWIFT. SWIFT messages were originally positional (before SWIFTML, the XMLified version). I don't know if it's a good suggestion as it's kinda obscure but maybe you could look at the SWIFT Formatting Guide, it may gives you some ideas.
Having that said, check out Flatworm, an humble flat file parser. I've used it to parse positional and/or CSV file and liked its XML descriptor format. It may be a better suggestion than SWIFT :)
CSV
CSV is a delimited data format that has fields/columns separated by the comma character and records/rows separated by newlines. Fields that contain a special character (comma, newline, or double quote), must be enclosed in double quotes. However, if a line contains a single entry which is the empty string, it may be enclosed in double quotes. If a field's value contains a double quote character it is escaped by placing another double quote character next to it. The CSV file format does not require a specific character encoding, byte order, or line terminator format.
The CSV entry on wikipedia allowed me to find a comparison of data serialization formats that is pretty much what you asked for.
The only similar thing I know of is Hachoir, which can currently parse 70 file formats:
http://bitbucket.org/haypo/hachoir/wiki/Home
I'm not sure if it really counts as a declarative language, since it's plugin parser based, but it seems to work, and is extensible, which may meet your needs just fine.
As an aside, there are interesting standardised, extensible flat-file FORMATS, such as IFF (Interchange File Format).

How do you manage the String Translation Process?

I am working on a Software Project that needs to be translated into 30 languages. This means that changing any string incurs into a relatively high cost. Additionally, translation does not happen overnight, because the translation package needs to be worked by different translators, so this might take a while.
Adding new features is cumbersome somehow. We can think up all the Strings that will be needed before we actually code the UI, but sometimes still we need to add new strings because of bug fixes or because of an oversight.
So the question is, how do you manage all this process? Any tips in how to ease the impact of translation in the software project? How to rule the strings, instead of having the strings rule you?
EDIT: We are using Java and all Strings are internationalized using Resource Bundles, so the problem is not the internationalization per-se, but the management of the strings.
I'm not sure the platform you're internationalizing in. I've written an answer before on the best way to il8n an application. See What do I need to know to globalize an asp.net application?
That said - managing the translations themselves is hard. The problem is that you'll be using the same piece of text across multiple pages. Your framework may not, however, support only having that piece of text in one file (resource files in asp.net, for instance, encourage you to have one resource file per language).
The way that we found to work with things was to have a central database repository of translations. We created a small .net application to import translations from resource files into that database and to export translations from that database to resource files. There is, thus, an additional step in the build process to build the resource files.
The other issue you're going to have is passing translations to your translation vendor and back. There are a couple ways for this - see if your translation vendor is willing to accept XML files and return properly formatted XML files. This is, really, one of the best ways, since it allows you to automate your import and export of translation files. Another alternative, if your vendor allows it, is to create a website to allow them to edit the translations.
In the end, your answer for translations will be the same for any other process that requires repetition and manual work. Automate, automate, automate. Automate every single thing that you can. Copy and paste is not your friend in this scenario.
Pootle is an webapp that allows to manage translation process over the web.
There are a number of major issues that need to be considered when internationalizing an application.
Not all strings are created equally. Depending upon the language, the length of a sentence can change significantly. In some languages, it can be half as long and in others it can be triple the length. Make sure to design your GUI widgets with enough space to handle strings that are larger than your English strings.
Translators are typically not programmers. Do not expect the translators to be able to read and maintain the correct file formats for resource files. You should setup a mechanism where you can transform the translated data round trip to your resource files from something like an spreadsheet. One possibility is to use XSL filters with Open Office, so that you can save to Resource files directly in a spreadsheet application. Also, translators or translation service companies may already have their own databases, so it is good to ask about what they use and write some tools to automate.
You will need to append data to strings - don't pretend that you will never have to or you will always be able to put the string at the end. Make sure that you have a string formatter setup for replacing placeholders in strings. Furthermore, make sure to document what are typical values that will be replaced for the translators. Remember, the order of the placeholders may change in different languages.
Name your i8n string variables something that reflects their meaning. Do you really want to be looking up numbers in a resource file to find out what is the contents of a given string. Developers depend on being able to read the string output in code for efficiency a lot more than they often realize.
Don't be afraid of code-generation. In my current project, I have written a small Java program that is called by ant that parses all of the keys of the default language (master) resource file and then maps the key to a constant defined in my localization class. See below. The lines in between the //---- comments is auto-generated. I run the generator every time I add a string.
public final class l7d {
...normal junk
/**
* Reference to the localized strings resource bundle.
*/
public static final ResourceBundle l7dBundle =
ResourceBundle.getBundle(BUNDLE_PATH);
//---- start l7d fields ----\
public static final String ERROR_AuthenticationException;
public static final String ERROR_cannot_find_algorithm;
public static final String ERROR_invalid_context;
...many more
//---- end l7d fields ----\
static {
//---- start setting l7d fields ----\
ERROR_AuthenticationException = l7dBundle.getString("ERROR_AuthenticationException");
ERROR_cannot_find_algorithm = l7dBundle.getString("ERROR_cannot_find_algorithm");
ERROR_invalid_context = l7dBundle.getString("ERROR_invalid_context");
...many more
//---- end setting l7d fields ----\
}
The approach above offers a few benefits.
Since your string key is now defined as a field, your IDE should support code completion for it. This will save you a lot of type. It get's really frustrating looking up every key name and fixing typos every time you want to print a string.
Someone please correct me if I am wrong. By loading all of the strings into memory at static instantiation (as in the example) will result in a quicker load time at the cost of additional memory usage. I have found the additional amount of memory used is negligible and worth the trade off.
The localised projects I've worked on had 'string freeze' dates. After this time, the only way strings were allowed to be changed was with permission from a very senior member of the project management team.
It isn't exactly a perfect solution, but it did enable us to put defects regarding strings on hold until the next release with a valid reason. Once the string freeze has occured you also have a valid reason to deny adding brand new features to the project on 'spur of the moment' decisions. And having the permission come from high up meant that middle managers would have no power to change specs on your :)
If available, use a database for this. Each string gets an id, and there is either a table for each language, or one table for all with the language in a column (depending on how the site is accessed the performance dictates which is better). This allows updates from translators without trying to manage code files and version control details. Further, it's almost trivial to run reports on what isn't translated, and keep track of what was an autotranslation (engine) vs a real human translation.
If no database, then I stick each language in a separate file so version control issues are reduced. But the structure is basically the same - each string has an id.
-Adam
Not only did we use a database instead of the vaunted resource files (I have never understood why people use something like that which is a pain to manage, when we have such good tools for dealing with databases), but we also avoided the need to tag things in the application (forgetting to tag controls with numbers in VB6 Forms was always a problem) by using reflection to identify the controls for translation. Then we use an XML file which translates the controls to the phrase IDs from the dictionary database.
Although the mapping file had to be managed, it could still be managed independent of the build process, and the translation of the application was actually possible by end-users who had rights in the database.
The solution we came up to so far is having a small application in Excel that reads all the property files, and then shows a matrix with all the translations (languages as headers, keys as rows). It is quite evident what is missing then. This is send to the translators. When it comes back, then the sheet can be processed to generate the same property bundles back again. So far it has eased the pain somewhat, but I wonder what else is around.
This google book - resource file management gives some good tips
You can use Resource File Management software to keep track of strings that have changed and control the workflow to get them translated - otherwise you end up in a mess of freezes and overbearing version control
Some tools that do this sort of thing - no connection an I haven't actually used them, just researching
http://www.sisulizer.com/
http://www.translationzone.com/en/products/
I put in a makefile target that finds all the .properties files and puts them in a zip file to send off to the translators. I offered to send them just diffs, but for some reason they want the whole bundle of files each time. I think they have their own system for tracking just differences, because they charge us based on how many strings have changed from one time to the next. When I get their delivery back, I manually diff all their files with the previous delivery to see if anything unexpected has changed - one time all the PT_BR (Brazillian Portuguese) strings changed, and it turns out they'd used a PT_PT (Portuguese Portuguese) translator for that batch in spite of the order for PT_BR.
In Java, internationalization is accomplished by moving the strings to resource bundles ... the translation process is still long and arduous, but at least it's separated from the process of producing the software, releasing service packs etc. One thing that helps is to have a CI system that repackages everything any time changes are made. We can have a new version tested and out in a matter of minutes whether it's a code change, new language pack or both.
For starters, I'd use default strings in case a translation is missing. For example, the English or Spanish value.
Secondly, you might want to consider a web app or something similar for your translators to use. This requires some resources upfront, but at least you won't need to send files around and it will be obvious for the translators which strings are new, etc.

Resources