Property conditions file

You can use the property conditions file to set values for properties with conditions or without conditions. You can also use a separate include file to define properties using a property = value format.

Setting values using conditions

The first line in the property conditions file is a header row that lists the database names of document or job properties, separated by commas. Normally the leftmost part of the header row specifies the properties to test for one or more conditions, although this order is not required.

The header row is followed by one or more condition rows that define the conditions, and the property values to be set when all the conditions in that row are true. You can think of each condition row as representing an if-then statement. All specified conditions in a row are logically ANDed together and must all be true. If any of the conditions in a row are not true, none of the values in that row are set. The values in the condition rows are separated by commas.

This example shows the contents of a property conditions file that sets property values based on conditions:

Doc.Custom.MailCategory,Job.Name,Doc.Run.PAVE
=USPS,,Yes
=USPS,~XYZ*,No
=NonUSPS,,No
=Exception,,No

The first if-then condition specifies that if a mailpiece category is USPS, RICOH ProcessDirector sets the Doc.Run.PAVE property to Yes. The second row sets the value of Doc.Run.PAVE to No when the job name begins with XYZ.

We recommend that you place all properties that are part of conditions to the left of the properties that are receiving values.

Properties that are part of conditions use condition characters from this set:

Using a segment of a property value with symbol notation and the substring specifier

If you want to use only a portion of a property in a condition - such as using only the first 5 characters of a property's value - you can use the substring specifier to indicate the portion of the property that you want to use.

The syntax is:

• ${property_name;substr;start;length}

• property_name is the name of the property, such as Job.Name.
• start is the position in the string that you want to start from.
• length is the number of characters to use in the condition; if you enter a length that is more than the number of characters in the property, the rest of the property is used.

This table shows some examples:

Creating concatenated values with symbol notation

In addition to using symbol notation to set conditions or assign values based on the current value of a particular property, you can combine symbols to create a concatenated single value, or use them with literal strings.

This table shows some examples:

Setting values without defining conditions

The format of the conditions file is the same, with a header row that contains property database names and a second row that lists property values. However, the conditions file contains only two rows. If you include more than one row of property values, only the values specified in the last row are saved.

This example shows the contents of a property conditions file that sets property values without using conditions:

Doc.Custom.MailCategory,Job.Name,Doc.Run.PAVE
USPS,PostalDiscount,Yes

Setting values with a separate include file

If you have a collection of properties that remain the same for several workflows, you can define those properties in a separate include file that you refer to in the property conditions file.

To refer to a separate include file, put @include in the header row of the property conditions file, and specify the relative or absolute path to the include file in the second row of the property conditions file.

This example shows the contents of a property conditions file that contains @include and a path to a separate include file:

Doc.Custom.MailCategory,Job.Name,@include
USPS,Priority,../prop-assignments/usps-properties.txt

In this example, the Mail Category property is assigned the value of USPS, the Job Name property is assigned the value Priority, and the relative path to the include file usps-properties.txt is specified.

The include file defines property values using the format Property name = Value. This example shows the format of the include file:

Doc.Insert.RecipientName=George Rogers
Job.CustomerName=CerbCo

The conditions file is processed from left to right and from top to bottom. This table contains examples to show how the property conditions file and the include file can override properties that were previously set. (These examples are for illustration only and are not intended as actual uses of the conditions file.)