2023:Ordered Array (Collation Provider)

This article is about an older version of Grooper. Information may be out of date and UI elements may have changed.
2025	2023

WIP	This article is a work-in-progress or created as a placeholder for testing purposes. This article is subject to change and/or expansion. It may be incomplete, inaccurate, or stop abruptly. This tag will be removed upon draft completion.

An Ordered Array is one of many Collation Providers you can use in Grooper to combine or organize extracted data based on the data's layout relationship.

About

Ordered Array is one of the Collation Providers and can be used for data organization depending on what you want to extract from your documents. All of the Collation Providers (except for Individual) essentially take multiple results and combine them into one. Ordered Array specifically only returns results based on the orientation of the information. If the data is lined up horizontally or vertically, you must select the corresponding layout property for Grooper to return the information.

From this basic information you might think that Ordered Array and Array just do the same thing. They are very similar, but Ordered Array has additional rules. The order of the data has to match the order of the child extractor objects under the object the collation is set on. Also, all of the child extractors must return something for Ordered Array to work.

Essentially, similar to an Array, an Ordered Array collated result is a collection of results who share a layout relationship that are all lined up together (either horizontally, vertically, or in the left/right and top/bottom text flow of the document). However, unlike Array the order and number of the results matter.

⚠	Before continuing with this tutorial it is advised that you have a good understanding of how the Array Collation Provider works. Take a look at our wiki page on Arrays.

Array vs. Ordered Array

First we're going to discuss some of the differences between an Array and Ordered Array Collation type. There are three main differences you need to be aware of:

• For an Ordered Array the order of your child extractors matters, whereas with Array it does not.
• All elements of your extractor must be present in order for Ordered Array to extract. There is no Minimum Elements property like when using Array.
• Unlike Array, Ordered Array will not collect information that is repeated unless there is a repeated child extractor.

Below we will illustrate what this looks like.

Array

Ordered Array