Edit Import Template

SETUP -> Import Templates -> Edit Import Template

This screen is used to configure a user defined import template. It has three pages: Details, Parameters and Fields.

Details

The kind of files that can be imported into College Office are simple ASCII files (plain character text files that can be edited via Microsoft Notepad) which use standard characters to delimit columns and lines. This page is used to tell College Office how fields and lines are delimited in the documents that will be imported via this template.

Import Type: Import Type from which this template is derived. The import type is selected when the template is created and cannot be changed afterwards. The import type determines the information that will be imported into College Office: click on the purple text to view a description.
Name: name of the import template: this is the name users will see when they select a template in order to import a batch of records.
Field Separator: character used to separate fields (or columns) in each line of the imported document. This is usually a comma ',' (hence the common name CSV which stands for comma separated values.) Make sure this character is used exclusively to separate field values and is not used within the value of any field since this would confuse College Office.
Ignore First Line: select Yes if the first line of the imported documents should be ignored (because it contains the names/headers of the columns/fields rather than proper values)
End Of Line: character(s) used to indicate an end of line (EOL) in the imported document. The EOL delimiter is determined by the operating system the file comes from.
Description: enter a description/explanation of the template.

Note: you cannot directly import a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet in its original format, you must first save it as a CSV file.

Parameters

Parameters provide extra information required by College Office to import a batch of records of a given type.

The Import Type of the template determines which parameters are required when importing a file. Certain parameters are Document Specific which means they are specific to each imported document (they must be filled at the time the document is imported), but you can still use this page to set default values for those parameters if need be. Other parameters are specific to your institution and have the same value for all imported documents: they should be filled here with the required value and are marked as Not Document Specific. Click on a parameter to read its description/explanation, to see if it is document specific or not, and to set its value if applicable:

If the parameter can only take a value from a few predetermined options, then the button will be visible on the right of the Value field: click it to select one of the predetermined values.

Fields

Fields represent the pieces of data that College Office will try to extract from the document imported into College Office.

The page lists all the fields that this Import Type will be looking for in your document and asks you to match each field with the column number of the corresponding value in the imported document. Fields with a red asterisk * are required and must be matched with a non-zero column number in your document, other fields are not required and can be matched with the column number 0 if they do not exist in your document.

Click on a field to view a description of that field.