Posted in New Features | Tagged as: dat, edd, fields, filter, grid, import, readysuite, sort | No Comments »
We’re hard at work on some major new additions coming to the ReadySuite and ReadyConvert product lines. We’ll be discussing some of these in detail here as we get closer to releasing them.
First up, we’ve added the ability for you to specify data types for custom fields (aka metadata). An immediate benefit of this feature is how we allow you to sort and filter on columns in the grid. See illustration below – you can now filter on a date column by year, month and day.
In addition, date columns will be correctly sorted by oldest to newest or vice versa. Initially, we’re going to support the following data types: Boolean (Yes/No), Number, Decimal, Date, Time, Date/Time, Text and Memo. Other enhancements to the grid will allow you to correctly summarize number/decimal columns, see a checkbox for boolean types, and make coding changes using specialized editors in each cell.
With this change, we’ve added a new ‘Modify Fields’ dialog. Here you’ll be able to add, modify and delete fields. You can set a field to read-only mode by setting its Locked property, preventing accidental changes made to that field.
Fields will also support an export mask. This is particularly useful for Date fields. For example, if you specify an export mask on field ‘DATESENT’ and the date you imported was ‘2011-11-02’, on export you’ll be able to retrieve it as ‘11/02/2011’. You can specify export masks for Boolean, Date, Time, Date/Time, Decimal, and Number fields.
Further to supporting custom fields, we added an option to re-adjust the internal DOCID field. Using the Modify Fields dialog, you can set any field as the internal DOCID field.
In our next post, we’ll discuss how we’re adding support for saving projects.
Posted in New Features | Tagged as: batch update, delimited text, edd, metadata, readysuite | No Comments »
We’re about ready to wind down our Introduction to ReadySuite series with discussions geared towards enhancements to some of the core functionality. This post will focus on changes made to the import and export of delimited text.
First up, we’ll highlight how we’ve improved the import of delimited text files. One of most requested changes by our users was to allow new records to be created by this process. Previously, you had to link the delimited text import with an existing record (i.e. native and/or image based document). The benefit here was we could tell you which documents were “un-linked” or not found. Now you can add the record as a new document if it can’t be linked. If you don’t need to add these as new records, the option to generate a warning is still there.
We’ve also implemented an update-mode if the record already exists. You can choose to replace an existing field value or append the new value to the existing record. For example, if you had a field named PRODRANGES with the value “ABC001-ABC002” and a delimited text file with a PRODRANGES field having the value of “DEF001-DEF002”, the append mode would combine the values to be “ABC001-ABC002 DEF001-DEF002”.
Additionally, you can now choose to repeat the value of a field during the import delimited text process. If a field is marked to have its values repeated, any empty values will be replaced with the previous non-empty value. If you’re importing a FOLDER field whose value is only entered for the first document inside that folder, but you need it repeated for each document inside that folder, then mark the field to be repeated. The folder information will be re-used for each document until a new folder is encountered.
Moving on to exporting delimited text files, we’ve added the ability to export page records. When setting up the delimited text export, you can simply check a box to export all the pages or images in a document. Page level fields, such as filename, page number, folder and color status will be available. Document level fields will simply be repeated for each page in the document.
Group fields are now available to the delimited text export in addition to the EDRM and DII exports. This feature allows you to specify two or more fields to be “merged” on export in the event that one field does not have a value. This is useful if you have three fields called Author, From, and Creator but you only need one export field called Author. Based on the order you add the fields to the new group field, the first non-empty item will be used in the export field.
For those users who want to merge two or more fields together regardless of any existing data, we’ve added that ability to the Batch Update dialog. For example, if you want to merge BEGPROD1, BEGPROD2, and BEGPROD3 into a BEGPRODS field, you would use the following syntax:
${META:BEGPROD1}; ${META: BEGPROD2}; ${META: BEGPROD3}
Don’t worry if the above is confusing: we have an easy-to-use field picker to help in the process.
The changes highlighted in this post are also being provided to our ReadyConvert users, among other bug fixes, free of charge. ReadyConvert is our free load file verification and conversion tool used by many litigation professionals.
Our next blog post will focus on overall stability improvements and important changes to the document grid.
Posted in New Features | Tagged as: bates, edd, export, number, preview, readysuite | No Comments »
Document and page level numbering is the latest addition to our Introduction to ReadySuite series. This feature fits nicely with the discussed endorsing and exporting options. Utilizing the new numbering functionality allows users to re-brand existing image sets or create new production image sets. We let you easily create cross reference fields, use custom fields in the numbering scheme, and support a bates counter larger than 18 numerical digits with no limit in the prefix.
In page-level numbering, we divide the numbering scheme into three parts: prefix, separator, and counter. Typically the prefix value is static in content; however, we allow you to use one or more custom fields when building the prefix. For example, if each document being numbered has a field called “ExhNo”, you can use the document’s exhibit number in the prefix of each document. The separator lets you specify a character to put in between the prefix and counter. If no separator is desired, leave it blank.
The counter field allows you to indicate the starting number to use and the amount of leading zeros to pad. Entering “001483” in the counter field will yield 6 digits for each document, starting at 1483 and incrementing by 1 for each page until the end. Additionally, we allow you to reset the counter back to its original starting value for each document. Utilizing this feature lets you number each page in a document separate from the previous document.
In the above illustration, you can see we’ve defined two documents each with a unique exhibit number. Using the exhibit number field in the prefix, with 0001 as our counter and allowing the counter to reset after each document, would yield the above starting and ending exhibit numbers.
Generating cross reference reports is just as easy. At the time of numbering, we let you specify or create new fields to indicate the previous starting and ending document numbers. For example, if you are re-numbering your review set to create a production set, you can save the starting and ending review numbers in fields ReviewStart and ReviewEnd respectively.
As we inch closer towards releasing ReadySuite, we’re looking for a few additional beta testers. Contact Justin Blessing if you’re interested in joining our test team.
