There are three distinct activities in Filegroove operations. The first two are configuration activities and, typically, the only regular activity is the last one: Data transformation.
The activities are explained below:
Specify your target format
The first step is to specfy your target format. This is the desired format that you want your data mapped to regardless of which organization's source file is being processed. In Filegroove this is known as a Target Object Definition or "TOD".
A TOD specifies each field in the target specification by defining its name, type and whether or not it is a mandatory field. Filegroove can be configured to raise errors during data transformation if a mandatory field has not been supplied with a value.
Specify how a source file is to be mapped
For each type of input file we need to tell Filegroove how to map it's contents to fields in the target format specified by a TOD.
This is where the Filegroove Studio comes into play. After entering the Studio you can select which TOD is to be the target of your mapping activity and then you upload a sample source file into the Studio. You then use Filegroove Studio's easy to learn, intuitive point and click interface to specify which source columns map to which target columns.
In the real world simple "column to column" mappings are usually not sufficient. Often there are conditions underwhich some rows are to be ignored, or certain "codes" in an input file need to be transformed to their equivalent "standard code" that is required by the downstream system into which the transformed data will be sent.
That's where Filegroove Studio's advanced visual programming language provides you with the power of variables, sophisticated logic plus a large library of functions that you can call to perform text analysis, text extraction, date extraction, basic calculations, advanced financial calculations and much, much more.
Filegroove Studio allows you to "visually code" the conditional logic, assignment of temporary variables etc., in a way that it is impossible to create syntax errors. This powerful capability allows non developers to "develop" mappings for Filegroove.
The mappings and any visually coded logic created in Filegroove Studio is stored in what is called a Target Object Mapping or "TOM". TOMs are managed for you within the studio - you don't have to save them anywhere else. They are protected and secure and so can not be seen or used by anyone outside of your organization.
Data transformation
You could set up an API connection from your app to Filegroove so that each file you receive is immediately sent to Filegroove for processing and then a fully transformed/normalized set of objects in the format and file type (e.g. Excel, CSV etc.,) required for importing into your system is returned to your application, ready for further processing.
All it takes to introduce Filegroove data transformation into your organization's workflow is to specify your target object definition (TOD) and then for each source file format, create a target object mapping (TOM) easily and quickly in the Filegroove Studio.
To see how easy Filegroove is to use, see it in action by requesting a demo: Request a demo
