Change in Value Separation (Separation Provider)

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This article is about the current version of Grooper. Note that some content may still need to be updated.
2025	2023.1

The Change in Value Separation Provider creates a new folder and separates every time an extracted value changes from one contract Batch Page to another.

You may download the ZIP(s) below and upload it into your own Grooper environment (version 2023.1). The first contains one or more Batches of sample documents. The second contains one or more Projects with resources used in examples throughout this article. Media:2023.1 Wiki Change-In-Value-Separation Batches.zip Media:2023.1 Wiki Change-In-Value-Separation Project.zip

About

A Data Extractor is written to find a value on a page (such as an invoice number on invoices or a report number on a report). This is set on the Value Extractor property. When the extractor returns a result on a page, the page is placed in a new folder, creating a new document. All subsequent pages returning the same value are included in the folder. Once a page is encountered returning a different value, a new Document Folder (and thus new document) is created.

If the extractor fails to produce a result, no folder will be created. The page will remain loose in the Batch and the provider will move on to the next page to check if its value is different from the last one produced. If this is not the desired result, the Miss Disposition property can be used to Append or Merge the pages to another folder.

How To

Setting the Provider

1. In this example we have added a Separate Step to the Batch Process.
2. We have set the Provider to Change in Value Separation.
3. Click the hamburger menu to ther ight of the Value Extractor property.
4. For this example wer are going to use a Pattern Match.

1. We have put in a Value Pattern of Report #: (\d+|[A-Z]\d{2}-\d{3}) to return the report numbers from the documents in our Batch.

1. When we run Separation, at first glance it looks like all of the document separated appropriately.

1. If we look closer, we see that we have several pages that were not separated into a folder and remain as loose pages.
2. We see that on page 2 and all subsequent pages of the fifth report, the report number is missing. Since Grooper did not return anything on the page, it didn't know what to do with the document so it left it as a loose page.

The Miss Disposition Property

In the previous section we ended up with several documents that were not separated into folders and remained loose pages. This was because Grooper did not know what to do with the documents that did not return a result. In this section, we are going to look at how the Miss Disposition can solve this problem for us.

1. We are going to go back into our Separate Step.
2. Take a look at the Miss Disposition property located under the "ACTIVITY PROPERTIES" panel. Click on the hamburger icon to access the drop-down menu.
3. For this example, we are going to set the Miss Disposition to Append.

1. With the Miss Disposition property set to Append, any document that does not return a result will be appended to the previous folder. Now when we run separation, these pages will be separated appropriately.

FYI	If you set the Miss Disposition property to Merge it will work the same way as Append but there will be an additional setting called the Maximum Gap. This allows you to set the maximum number of pages it can append to the folder.