Joe Mempin
- Sep 29, 2020
- 2 min read

(Tips & Tricks) - Delimited Names Data Collection

Documents created by outside sources may have a patterned naming convention which provides the collection of metadata based on that naming convention. Usually, the pattern contains metadata separated by a delimiter.

For example, a human resources software may provide exports of files for an employee that will contain the employee name, employee ID, and the type of document:

Jones, Samantha_1465_application
Jones, Samantha_1465_W4
Jones, Samantha_1465_Evaluation2018
Jones, Samantha_1465_Evaluation2019
Jones, Samantha_1465_Evaluation2020

Collecting these metadata values, at the time of document creation, may save time and resources. Laserfiche Workflow and its Pattern Matching activity can automate the collection of the metadata, but are there other options?

Using the Pattern Matching activity will allow a formulated regular expression to collect the set of metadata. However, the regular expression may get a bit complicated based on the values these metadata sections contain. The regular expression requires the designer to think of all the combination of characters that can be provided in each section of the document name without getting false positives.

A better solution may be to use the Split function rather than a pattern match in Laserfiche Workflow. The split function can be found in the Token Dialog and can be set by enabling the “Apply Function” checkbox.

Enabling the Apply Function will also enable the “Select a function” link which appears below the checkbox. Selecting the link will provide a function dialog where the Split function can be selected.

By selecting the Split function, the “Split on” textbox is enabled to allow for a split character to be set. The result is a multi-value token that can be used as field values, conditional decision evaluations, database lookups, etc.