Document Property Designer

You can work with your RICOH ProcessDirector support representative to define custom properties for your installation. You can define these document properties, for example:

• To sort documents according to ZIP codes, you can define a custom document property named Zip code.
• To group documents according to account numbers, you can define a custom document property named Account number.

A customized property can contain the value of any index tag in an AFP document. Index tags are called Tagged Logical Elements (TLEs) in the AFP architecture.

You use Document Property Designer to link the properties to index tags that are defined in a sample AFP file that represents your production AFP files. Document Property Designer creates a Visual Workbench control file with information about how the properties are linked to index tags. Then you configure the RICOH ProcessDirector steps that calculate the values of properties. The steps use the control file to determine how document or job properties are linked to index tags.

For example, if you have defined a document property named Zip code, and each document in your sample AFP file contains an index tag named mail code that contains the ZIP code, you can use the Document Property Designer to link the Zip code document property to the mail code index tag. When a document property is linked to an index tag, RICOH ProcessDirector assigns the value of the index tag to the document property in the production AFP jobs that contain the same index tags as the sample AFP file.

You can link the same property to different index tags in different sample AFP files. For example, if one sample AFP file has an index tag named mail code and a second sample AFP file has an index tag named route code, you can link the same document property to index tag mail code in the first sample AFP file and to index tag route code in the second sample AFP file. If you link one or more properties to different index tags in different sample AFP files, you must create a separate Visual Workbench control file for each sample AFP file. Then you can configure the RICOH ProcessDirector steps that calculate the values of properties so that each step uses the control file that applies to the production AFP jobs that use the workflow.

You can also link several index tags to the same property. For example, if you have an index tag named routing code and an index tag named postal code, you can map both index tags to the property mail code. You can use the same Visual Workbench control file for several jobs that use different index tag names for the same property; however, the system expects that only one of the index tags will be in a particular document. If more than one index tag occurs in a document, the system assigns the property value based on the first occurrence.

When you link properties to index tags, Document Property Designer also lets you:

• Edit the index tag value so that the property contains only part of the index tag value. For example, you can edit a customer account number so that the property contains only a portion of the account number.
• Define link options for the properties. For example, you can specify the default value for a document property if the index tag is not found in a document.