Defining a source file format

Based on your knowledge of source file properties, select formatting properties that most closely match those of the source file. More accurately selecting source file properties minimizes manual definition of target table properties.

Type

Select the file type. The files can be flat, or delimited. The flat files do not have delimiters and qualifiers.

Encoding

Select an encoding type from the list. Table 3-2 lists and describes the file encoding types that BIRT Analytics supports.

Table 3-2

Supported encoding

Encoding	Description
ASCII	American Standard Code for Information Interchange
CP1252	Windows Latin-1
BIG5	Chinese character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for Traditional Chinese characters
BIG5-HKSCS	Standard supplementary character set used for information exchange in Chinese between the public and the Hong Kong SAR Government
CP1252	Windows Latin-1
GB18030	Chinese government standard describing the required language and character support necessary for software in China
GB2312	Official character set of the People’s Republic of China, used for simplified Chinese characters
GBK	An extension of the GB2312 character set for simplified Chinese characters, used in the People’s Republic of China
ISO-8859-1	ISO 8859-1, Latin Alphabet No. 1
ISO-8859-2	Latin Alphabet No. 2
ISO-8859-3	Latin Alphabet No. 3
ISO-8859-4	Latin Alphabet No. 4
ISO-8859-5	Latin/Cyrillic Alphabet
ISO-8859-6	Latin/Arabic Alphabet
ISO-8859-7	Latin/Greek Alphabet
ISO-8859-8	Latin/Hebrew Alphabet
ISO-8859-9	Latin Alphabet No. 5
ISO-8859-13	Latin Alphabet No. 7
ISO-8859-15	Latin Alphabet No. 9
UTF8	8-bit UCS Transformation Format
UTF16	16-bit UCS Transformation Format, byte order identified by an optional byte-order mark
UTF16LE	16-bit Unicode Transformation Format, little-endian byte order
UTF16BE	16-bit Unicode Transformation Format, big-endian byte order
WINDOWS-1252	Windows Latin-1

End Line

Select an end-of-line character from the list. Table 3-3 lists and describes the end-of-line characters and results supported by BIRT Analytics Loader.

Table 3-3

End-of-line characters and results

End-of-line character	Result description
CRLF	Carriage return and line feed
CR	Carriage return only
LF	Line feed only

File

Select a source file name from the list.

Delimiter

Select the character used to delimit or separate values in a delimited file only. The following delimiter characters are supported by BIRT Loader:

, ->| | : ; @ # " + - = '

Header

Select Header option if the source file includes information in a header. A file header contains multiple column names, each separated by a delimiter character.

Skip

In Skip, type a number that sets how many blank rows to insert between header information and record information in a file. If you select Header option, 1 appears in Skip by default.

Offset

Define the initial position of each column when the file format is flat file.

Qualifier

Select a qualifier character. BIRT Loader supports the following qualifier characters:

" ' ~

Choose None, if the file format does not use a qualifier.

Wellformed

Select the Wellformed option to enforce verification that each record contains all columns.

Copyright Actuate Corporation 2013

BIRT Analytics 4.2