Watch our video to learn how to create a custom field for an invoice document definition (template) in ABBYY FlexiCapture.
Hello, today I’d like to show you how to add a custom field to an invoice document definition or sometimes what we call a template. I want to show you an example of why we would do that. Say, for instance, I have this invoice sample on my screen, and at the bottom of our documents, and this is a very basic example, but maybe at the bottom, we have this document ID that I do wanna capture for every single document or invoice that comes in. It’s a very, very simple process to add one. We just gotta know a little bit about the steps.
Now the very first step that we need to do is we need to create a FlexiLayout, and FlexiLayout tells us the textual rules of a document. That’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna start a brand new FlexiLayout using the FlexiLayout Studio. What we’re gonna do is create a new one. In the new one, we are going to give it an intelligent name. Maybe we’ll say this is our Invoice Number. So then we will save this layout. The software’s gonna create it. We wanna make sure that we follow the next steps very, very, very importantly.
The first step is we wanna allow multiple pages, and we wanna allow that 1 to INF, infinite number of pages or infinity there. Next, we will add a sample that possibly just shows the software where it’s at, so we can use this to test with. So I’m gonna load a sample. I’m going to disable the header and footer. Those are right there, and we wanna disable these. Now the way we disable them is just right clicking and disable, and right click and disable.
In this simple case, I’m going to add a labeled field to extract the document ID here at the bottom. So we’re gonna add an element, and a label field, for document ID. Next thing I will do is just match it, and we’ll just make sure here that we have the document ID as a label and then the field there to the right. Next we’ll add our blocks, so we can return this back to the product. Then we will save.
Now this is a very basic example of how to add fields. Adding fields in an invoices layout can be done either generically, which means it will happen for every single invoice, or we can do one for vendor-specific layouts. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re not doing the latter; we’re doing the first one. We’re showing how we do it generically. So what I’m gonna do is save this, and then I’m gonna export this project. We’re gonna export the layout here.
Then I’m going to go into my document definitions, and I’m just gonna duplicate one to show this to you. What I would like to do is go to our properties, and we will go to our FlexiLayout tab, and we will load a new one. We wanna find the path of that AFL that we exported. Since I told it to keep the custom field, you can see my document ID now is created over here at the right. I will close this, and I will save it. Once we publish it, we’ll create a new batch, and we’ll load that sample in just so I can show you now that the software’s not only extracting the other invoice details, but it’s extracting that document number as well.
If we scroll down to the bottom, you can see now we’re extracting the document ID. We would do that now on every single document that we extract. So that’s a very, very simple example of how we create a generic layout that will be in place for every single invoice that we process through the system. You can see with all the flexibility of both the FlexiLayout Studio and the FlexiCapture application, we can pretty much customize the solution to do what we would like.
I hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us on our website, and we look forward to working with you. Thank you so much.