Data concepts
Regardless of the source of your data, there are a number of concepts that are common to all data that is imported into EasyCatalog
Fields
A field is a singular piece of information, such as a person’s name, job title or zip code. Analogous with a cell in an Excel spreadsheet.
Each cell represents a Field.
Records
A record is a collection of related fields which, when combined, describe something or someone. For example, a customer record would contain name, address, and telephone fields. Combined, these fields describe a single customer.
Rows and Columns
When arranged in a grid, or spreadsheet-style view, each record is represented by a row in the table; each field is a cell.
Therefore, a column is a collection of fields and all fields in the column contain the same type of information (i.e. all fields in the address column will contain address information).
Field Types
Each field that is imported into EasyCatalog has a type that determines both how it appears in the document and how it is treated when it is sorted, grouped, etc. Field types are defined on a column-by-column basis, so all fields in the same column will share the same type information.
Field types typically fall in to one of two categories, each with further refinements:
Alphanumeric fields
Can contain both text and numeric information, and will be sorted alphabetically on a character-by-character basis.
Numeric fields
Can only contain numeric information, although additional formatting can be applied to show currency symbols, thousands and decimal separators, etc. Numeric fields are sorted based on their numeric content.
Key Fields
To keep track of each record in your data source, EasyCatalog needs a way to uniquely identify each record. To do this, we use a key field.
The choice of key field is critical to the operation of EasyCatalog. The key field is used to uniquely identify each record from the data source and must never change.
The content of the key field must uniquely identify each record and must never change for the life of the record. Typically key field candidates can be a stock code, SKU, etc.
If the key field value for a record changes, EasyCatalog will determine that a record has been deleted (with the old key field value) and a new one created (with the new key field value). Fields placed in a document linked to the old key field value will be shown as .
More than one field can be selected as the key field. In this case, the combination of all of the chosen fields is used to determine the uniqueness of each record. As with a single key field selection, the content of all key fields must remain constant for the life of the record.
Choosing multiple fields can sometimes be necessary if the same record appears more than once in the data. In this case, it is necessary to identify an instance of each record using a combination of fields.
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