Watch our video to learn how to create a Repeating Group on a Fixed Form in ABBYY FlexiCapture. Understanding how to create repeating groups on a fixed form is an important technique to grasp when exporting data. Other helpful tips such as creating instances and viewing the data in a tabular format are explained in this demo as well.
Hello. In this video, I would like to share with you how we can create a repeating group on a fixed form. The reason why we would do a repeating group is really the desired output. Typically, when we have information that repeats kind of like what you see on the screen, where we have four different sets of items that really at the end of the day, we want to maybe export to Excel. We actually want each item to be an independent row. We always think about the export and what we need the export to do when we’re designing our document definition. So in today’s video, we’re going to create a repeating group that will put the ID for each of these numbers for each of these rows here into a separate row in our table, or if an inner group, if you would.
So what we’re going to do is go ahead and outline each of these fields. So we’re going to say, Hey, I want this ID. I want this date. And I want this type. We’re going to be pretty generous here on where we draw these items. The next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to select them all and we’re going to right click and say, “Group”. What the software will do is it will then put this little border around the whole outside of this group. I’m going to go ahead just for ease of what we’re going to do next. I’m going to expand this just a little bit to kind of be the border of everywhere I want to do.
Now, if you can see here, what we’ve done is we’ve created a repeating group. Of course, we can do all sorts of cool things, naming the fields, setting data types and all of those sorts of things that we do when we kind of take the next step. But for this video, I want to explain to you how we can create instances of the repeating groups. So that means that we’re going to have multiple rows in our table if you would. So what I will do is I’m going to right click and say “New Instance”. When I do that, the cursor will change and give me the ability to draw a new group instance and to do that, I can simply just select here. You’ll see that it will automatically put each of those borders in for each of the fields. And you’ll see here that I have a new instance at my table here, and I will just keep doing that for instances three and four as well.
So now that we’ve had the groups selected, what I will do is I will come through here and just do a little bit of cleanup, making sure that I have the field selected that I wanted to, and we’ll go from there. Okay. So the next step that we typically do now that we have a new instances or instances are drawn, we can then come into our fields. And the cool part about having a group is that we only need to select the fields. And of course, once I change the property of a field, it will apply to each instance. So in this case, I’m just going to select them all. I’m going to go to “Properties” and I just want to make sure that I have my marking type corrected here. And just to test what the layout will be, I will go to “Testing” and run the test. What you’ll see is that now that I have a group, I have multiple instances in my group. When I export the data or I run production documents, I can now have an example of a spreadsheet or in a database, I would actually have multiple rows of each of these instances, which is quite important, typically, when we think about exporting or downstream integration.
Just for view, I’ll actually tell the software to show this as a table. And now this may make a little sense here. So now what you can see here is each of these fields, is really a tabular preview of what we’re going to see when we export the data. So this is what we call a repeating group. Otherwise, what we would do is have multiple separate fields, but in this case here, we’re actually getting a table or a group of data so that we can export this appropriately. So I just wanted to give you a quick hint and show you how we can do that, when we create a repeating group on a fixed form, which is not something we commonly do, but yet a technique that is pretty important when we’re talking about the way that we want to export the data. Thank you so much for watching this video.