2.80:Separation (Concept)

Separation, in Grooper, is the process of turning loose pages into documents, by determining points in a Batch at which Batch Folders are created and subsequent Batch Pages are placed inside.

Pages are organized into document folders during the Separate activity. There are a variety of methods to separate pages into documents during this activity, including (but not limited to) the use of printed control sheets, defined page lengths, and extractible text content. The specific separation method is determined by the Separation Provider and its configuration used during the Separate activity. You may also save and re-use a Separation Provider's' configuration settings by creating a Separation Profile.

About

Imagine you have a big stack of paper pages. You need to organize these pages into certain kinds of documents, HR documents, accounts payable documents, accounts receivable documents, all kinds of documents. Before you can even get to the point of determining which document is which, you have to ask yourself a question. Is this stack of papers one huge document? Is each page their own document? How many documents are in this stack?

At what point does one document start and another begin?

Separation seeks to go through a stack of pages, one by one, and determine where a document begins and where it should end (most often where the next document begins). Is there some kind of cover page for each document? Is there something like a title or a page number indicating the first page? Are all documents just the same page length? Once you can answer these kinds of questions, you know where one document starts and another begins and distinguish between the loose pages and the documents they compose.

Grooper's document separation (via the Separate activity and Separation Providers) answers this question and automates its answer. Grooper operates much the same way in terms of analyzing loose pages and figuring out where one document starts and another begins. How these beginning and ending points are established, understood and executed is determined by which Separation Provider is used and how it is configured. Once that logic is established and configured, separation can be automated by the Separate activity.

Batch Basics - What is a document anyway?

A Batch is the fundamental unit of document processing in Grooper. It is functionally two things:

1. A container for folders and pages.
2. A list of processing instructions to do something with those folders and pages.

As such, all Batches have two child objects: A root Batch Folder A Batch Process

The root Batch Folder houses Batch Page and Batch Folder objects. As the top level (or root) of the Batch's Batch Folder hierarchy, containing all child Batch Folders and their contents, the root Batch Folder is often referred to as simply the "Batch". However, technically the Batch and root Batch Folder are two separate objects in Grooper. Alternatively, the root Batch Folder may be referred to as the "Batch Folder" and its child Batch Folders as simply "folders". However, from a technical standpoint, they are all Batch Folder objects. The Batch Process is a step by step set of configurable processing instructions comprised of Batch Steps, each one of which performs a different Activity in Grooper. Each Batch Step will be named after the Grooper Activity it executes by default.

As far as Grooper is concerned, a document is a Batch Folder object with one or more Batch Page objects as its children.

The term "page" is typically used interchangeably with Batch Page.

The terms "document" or "document folder" is used interchangibly with a Batch Folder that contains Batch Pages.

The term "folder" is typically