Column Sequence

A number used during processing to determine the order of columns in the file.  Similar to job sequence number.

Using a negative column sequence value during an EDI Import indicates to SLIK that the column is a “virtual” column  and does not exist in the physical flat file.

Dealer key

One of the columns (or literal value) specified in the column mapping must be designated as the dealer key.

During processing the value contained in this column is used to lookup the specified dealer to determine various details that include the document name/extension, file format (i.e., delimiter, etc.) and next export sequence number.  A change in the dealer key value also causes a new output stream to be created if it does not already exist.  This means that a table can contain, for example, invoices for multiple dealers and during the EDI transfer these are split up into multiple output files.

For an EDI Import, checking this attribute causes SLIK to assign the current dealer key value to the nominated column in the destination table.

Control break

An optional attribute used to control the target output stream.

Specifying one or more columns as control break(s) causes it to be included in the criteria for determining whether a new output file should be created.  A change in the value(s) of the specified column(s) causes a control break and is similar to how a change in dealer key value may create a new export/output file.

This feature allows you to specify, for a particular dealer:

I want all "MANIFESTNUMBERS" to be grouped into separate files.

Internally the output stream is either looked up and/or created and cached/remembered using a combination of "DealerKey[+ControlBreak1...+ControlBreakN]" as the lookup key.

This attribute has no effect during an EDI Import.

Record Counter

An optional attribute used to indicate that this column contains the total number of lines that will be written to the output file.

If not specified SLIK calculates this internally and will output this as the second column if the interface uses the default (i.e., no table-map) ‘HDR’ record type with no TableMap specified.

This attribute will cause SLIK to assign the number of records to the nominated column.

File Sequence Number

An optional attribute used to indicate that the column value should be used as the next file sequence.

This attribute assigns the file sequence number to the specified column.

Skip/No Output

This can be combined with the other attributes to cause the column to be used as a control type column but not to be actually included in the output file.

Causes SLIK to parse the specified data in the flat file but not to update or insert the columns into the destination table.