Indexing data in the input file

The parameter file that you create runs the ACIF program to index the input file.

Note: ACIF does not look for indexing information in PTOCA objects or Unicode complex text, and does not use PTOCA text controls to index the file.

The example in Example of an AIX parameter file for ASCII input data uses these data values as the indexing attributes:

  • Account Number
  • Name
  • Address
  • City, State, ZIP
  • Date Due

You must specify the ACIF indexing parameters so that the first page of each bill includes group-level indexing tags that contain the values of all five of these attributes.

To generate the indexing attributes:

  1. Specify the TRIGGER1 parameter because ACIF always scans for the data that is specified in TRIGGER1 first. Because the data contains carriage control characters, include a carriage control character of ‘1’ to indicate a new page. ACIF locates the start of a page by searching every record in the file for a trigger value of ‘1’ in column 1 of the data. Specify this parameter:
    • TRIGGER1 = *,1,'1'

    When ACIF finds a record that contains a ‘1’ in column 1, that record becomes the indexing anchor record.

  2. Define subsequent TRIGGERn parameters relative to the indexing anchor record. In this example, you want to ensure that the