2.90:Collation Provider (Property)

Collation Providers allow Data Type extractor results to be combined, organized, or utilized in specific ways.

Results can be combined, made into arrays, returned as a key-value pair's value, and more.

The following Collation Providers are available in Grooper:

• Individual
• Combine
• Key-Value Pair
• Key-Value List
• Array
• Ordered Array
• Split
• Pattern-Based
• Multi-Column

About

Data Type extractors in Grooper use regular expression to match a document's text data in order to return a particular piece of information. Extractors serve a variety of purposes. They can be used to populate fields in a Data Model, to separate and classify documents, to break up a document into sections, and more. For the most part, any time part of document's text data is needed or useful to do something, you need an extractor to find and return it.

Often, this requires something more complex than returning a single result. The relationships between multiple extraction results are often important. The fact results are physically related to each other on the page, or text exists between one or more results, or results are in one order versus another can be used accomplish various goals in Grooper.

For example, the Individual, Array, and Ordered Array Collation Providers all collate results differently.

IndividualArray

Individual

The Individual Collation Provider returns all extraction results individually. This is the default Collation Provider for Data Type extractors.

This Data Type extractor, whose results are seen here, has five child extractors, all passing their own results up to the parent extractor. The child extractors are as follows: Name - This Data Type extractor returns names on the document. Here, US presidents. Date - This Data Type extractor returns dates. Here, president's birthdays and inauguration days, depending on the table. City/State - This Data Type extractor returns the city and state values listed for a president's birthday. Number of Days - This Data Format extractor returns numbers. Here, the number of days in office. Party - This Data Format extractor returns the results of a list of political party names. The parent Data Type's Collation property is set to Individual. The Collation property determines the Collation Provider used. You can see in the "Results" panel, everything each child extractor returns to the parent Data Type is listed as a distinct, individual result. A total of 56 results with the first item physically on the page listed first.

Array

The Array Collation Provider organizes and returns results much differently.

• First, it will only return results if multiple extraction results are lined up in a particular order on the page, according to the "layout" set for this provider. For example, an Array collated extractor using a Horizontal Layout will only return results if they are aligned horizontally, one result after another from left to right.
• Second, instead of each result being returned individually, all results meeting the layout requirements are returned as a single value.

Essentially, an 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).

This Data Type extractor has the exact same child extractors, but uses the Array Collation Provider instead of Individual. The parent Data Type's Collation property is set to Individual. The Minimum Elements property defaults to 2. This means the array must contain at least two extraction results. For this extractor, it could be a name and a date. It could be two dates. It could be forty dates. It could be a name, a date, a city/state location, a number, and a political party. It doesn't matter, as long as there are two results. The Horizontal Layout is set to Enabled. At least one of the three Layout properties must be enabled. Using the Horizontal Layout, only results aligned horizontally with each other will count as an array. Here, this effectively returns full rows of each table, since one extraction result follows the other from left to right in a horizontal line. Notice we now only return 12 results. Rather than each individual result from each child extractor, results are ordered and returned according to the Array Collation Provider and its configuration. Results are combined into a single result, as long as they are aligned horizontally with each other.