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Datasource entry

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The datasource entry represents your datasource. You select a data column and MyDataMerge will read the matching data cell on export.
Note: For speed reasons, there are just a few records listed (not the whole datasource). For the selection of a data column, this is enough.

1. Elements list

The title (blue) represents the data title of the selected data column in the popup window. The small line below indicates the element type „datasource entry“.
To edit an element, simply double click it or click the pen icon.

2. Options

The following options are available from left to right:

  • Delete element
  • Duplicate element
  • Settings (only available if element is valid)
  • Edit

Note: The datasource element has different settings, depending on the currently selected replacement type (Check section below).

3. Data selection

In the popup, you can click a data column to assign it to the element. You can navigate by arrow keys or by pressing the matching column letter (a-z) on your keyboard.

Datasource element settings

Settings for „Replace with text“ and “Replace with image”

Allow empty value
The default behaviour is to report an error if a data cell is empty. If this option is selected, no error will be reported and nothing will happen in the merge process.
Note: This WILL lead to empty fields in the generated document. Be careful wit this option.

Remove leading/trailing whitespaces
This option will remove every leading or trailing space character of a data cells content.

Remove all whitespaces
This option will remove every space character of a data cells content.

Validate Email
This option will validate the content of a data cell for a valid email. If it’s not a valid email, an error will be reported.

Text transformation

  • Uppercase: Will transform each character to uppercase.
  • Lowercase: Will transform each character to lowercase.
  • Proper: Will transform the first character of every word to uppercase.

Number formatting
Note: These settings are directly influenced by your localisation settings.
Important: If you use file as datasource, format the cells as „number“ – other formats may cause unintended behavior

  • Decimal: Turns a number to a decimal
  • Currency: Adds the localised currency symbol/text
  • Currency (ISO): Adds the ISO currency symbol/text
  • Currency plural: Adds the plural currency symbol/text
  • Spell out: Turns a number into text like spelled
  • Ordinal: Turns a number into its ordinal pendant (if applicable)

Unify phone number
Removes every character from the text except ‚0-9‘ and ‚+‘.
Note: Don’t use on normal text

Sanitize for web
Transforms text to lowercase, replaces space characters with underscore, will remove every character except ‚A-Z‘ and 0-9. Transforms german Umlauts.
Hint: Use this if you create custom filenames

Add space before/after
Adds a space character before/after the text

Settings for “Replace with QR-Code”

1. QR-Code color
Within the QR-Code settings you see the color information imported from your layout document. Check Replace with QR-Code for more information on how to set these.

2. Sanitize semicolon and colon
Due to technical limitations from Adobe® InDesign® you cannot have colons and semicolons in your QR-Code’s content. This option removes both from incoming input. If the option is turned off and input contains one of the two characters, an error will be thrown.
Technical explanation of the limitation:
MyDataMerge creates CSV files for Adobe® InDesign® and a special format for QR-Codes. This format uses semicolon and colons as control characters. Unfortunately, Adobe® InDesign® does not allow them to be escaped – so MyDataMerge needs to remove them from content.