Jon,
For Imports, one of the Advanced Options is to Ignore White space, which should take care of leading and trailing spaces for imports. I think having a general global rule that ensures any attribute update in any record in designated repositories is cleared of any leading or trailing white space. I think it makes sense to have this control at the repository level (you would open the <repository> -> Edit -> Properties) to set the option. There is an existing Jira ticket open, requesting this capability: EW-4545. I have updated the comments in it to indicate that Fender, Graco, and AD are also interested in having such a feature. I suggest that anyone else who wishes to have this capability or escalate its importance open a Support ticket with a reference to this Jira ticket and details on what the impact is by NOT having the capability.
The workaround would be to define an Export/Import sequence for each repository (in which the white space needs to be removed), and use SQL for the export to output any record having leading or trailing white space to the file, then importing the resulting file with the option to Ignore White space to force it to remove that white space. If the attributes are in the snapshot, then the SQL can reference them directly. If they are NOT in the snapshot, the SQL would need to extract the values from the XML column. To maintain the process, any time attributes are added or removed, the export SQL would need to be updated as well as the Import Template for the import. Once implemented, the export/import sequence might produce a non-empty file the first time it is run, but if it were to be run again immediately, the second time should produce an empty file since the first import should have cleared any white space. The sequence could be configured to run periodically (such as daily or weekly) with the understanding that there would be latency between updates that add white space and when that white space is cleared. But you could always run that process on-demand or tie it to key processes, such as a precursor to a scheduled promotion and/or export.
-Brian
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Brian Zupke | Senior Technical Support Engineer
Winshuttle North America | 909-900-9179
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Original Message:
Sent: 07-27-2022 09:23
From: Jonathan Varo
Subject: Global Trim Rule in EnterWorks
Hi.
One thing that is absolutely useless is having spaces at the end of data entries by users and administrators alike. Since you can't see them, it's hard to detect them. Is there a way to add a global trim command in the java coding of the system, that will remove all blank spaces inadvertently added to the beginning and end of all fields? I'm aware of the VTL command and I have that added to a select few popular fields but it's never necessary to have spaces at the beginning or end in any of the data. Should be a global rule, don't you agree? Thoughts on this??
Best,
-Jon
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Jonathan Varo | Manager - PIM Group
Fender Musical Instruments Corporation | 480-845-5823
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