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Question

Splitting a template field to populate fields in a new template

asked on April 25, 2016

I have sifted through Answers and have yet been able to find this break down.  If it is already out there, please point me in the right direction.

 

I have thousands of records that have a field name of “Full Name”. This would include an individual’s ( Lastname, Firstname Middle ). In that order with the comma after last name.

 

We have built a new template to capture additional data that we have been missing and the new template redesign breaks out the Name fields into three individual fields of Lastname, Firstname Middle instead of Full Name.

 

So, assuming I would use Retrieve Field Values in workflow and convert to a Token value and then assigned the value to the new template fields, how do I break the “Full Name” field into three parts? Currently using version 9.

 

I also have the a need to be able to do the exact same thing with some document names, where I would break the format of the document name up and fill in the fields of a new template.

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Replies

replied on April 25, 2016

Names are complicated when it comes to regular expression because they follow no pattern. The easy cases are when you can assume they're in the "First Last" or "First Middle Last" format. But you could also have "First Last Suffix" (John Smith Jr.) or "First Middle Last Suffix" or "Preffix First Last" (Dr. John Smith).

You could try to handle the expected cases and detect when you're in one of the non-standard ones and kick those documents to a human for the final decision.

So I'd try breaking the name up into individual "words" and generate a multi-value token.

The pattern is ([\w\-]{3,}), i.e., any alphanumeric character or a dash, at least 3 in a row. This is going to get most names, but will have issues with 2-letter names like "Ed" or "Li". So in some cases, you may get less values.

Then you could figure out if you have 2 or 3 values and set the appropriate fields.

You'll probably have to do a bit more testing and tweaking to get it to work in most cases. You could lower the character count in the name, for ex, but then it would need more validation to check you didn't accidentally get the suffix instead of the last name.

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replied on April 29, 2016

Miruna, Thank you for the reply and the direction.  For the Pattern matching, I used ([\w\-]{3,})\s* and it worked perfectly to break out the full name.

However, getting the count transfer of information to the new template has been unsuccessful.  I will break this down in pictures.  Sorry if it overly long.

 

These are both set to Starting Entry.

You can also see the "If not in 2 or 3 Values", "Create a Shortcut to Entry".  These are green however it captures those files or folders that have no template assigned as well as those that do have the values because the first two are not working correctly.

Below are the returned Conditional Decision values that come back for each file.

Thanks for the help.

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