Completing the Format

With the input fields acquired and listed in the format window, the final step is to remove any that are not required and to specify the type of data in each field.

The format window will look similar to this.

A source file may contain additional fields containing information that is not needed in Cubix or for the mapping process. These fields can be deleted from the list and their data will not need to be processed through the mapping.

Many of the data fields will contain text and reference information such as company codes, cost centres and accounts which will define where the data goes to in Cubix. However, at least one of the fields will contain the values that you ultimately want to load into Cubix. These fields containing the values should have their type changed to Value

The format is now ready, but there are a couple of other features that you might need for file processing.

Excluding Lines

Click the Ignore Lines button to display the Ignore lines dialog box – this allows you to specify lines that should not be processed.
Click the New button to make a new entry. Having done that, click the Ignore Option cell for that entry to present a list of available options to use as criteria for ignoring a line.

There are three ignore options:

Data Filtering

Data Filters allow you to process the data in the input fields according to text that you can specify.
Click the New button to create a new entry. Click the Option cell of this entry to see a list of the options available for filtering of data.

The options are:

Type the text you want to use for the filter option directly into the Text field.

Rule serves as a multiplier – the default value is 1, thereby having no effect on the data. You can enter decimals into this field, thus enabling you to use the Rule to divide by numbers as well (for example, if you wanted to filter by dividing certain data by 1000, you could enter a value of .001 in the Rule field.

*Examples of the use of the Data Filters option: We want to take data from a General Ledger system, which represents positive values as normal, but represents negative values as a positive value inside brackets, hence -65000 would appear in our file as (65000). We want to use this data in our model, in which negative values are represented as negative numbers. Hence, we want to turn (65000) into
-65000. In the Data Filters dialog, we create a new filter, choose the option Brackets, and enter a value of -1 in the Rule cell. Any data contained in brackets will be multiplied by -1 (i.e. will become negative)