Supplemental pages

AFP Indexer lets you define pages in an AFP file as supplemental pages. Supplemental pages are those pages that you do not want included in page groups, such as header and trailer pages, separator pages, or any page that should be excluded from a customer statement.

Pages in an AFP file that are defined as supplemental pages can be indexed.

You can define supplemental pages in these ways:

  • You can use a trigger to define a block of text that occurs in a consistent location and uniquely identifies a page. If necessary, you can use multiple triggers to identify supplemental pages. For example, you can create a trigger for a block of text that exists on the third page in a page group. The supplemental page is removed from each page group.
  • You can use an index tag to define a block of text that occurs in a consistent location on a page that is outside a page group. For example, you can create an index tag for a block of text that exists on the header and trailer pages. You can edit the text value to remove unwanted text such as blanks or special characters.
When you define a supplemental page, you give it a page definition name. You can assign multiple index tags and triggers to the same supplemental page definition.
Note: The term page definition in AFP Indexer refers to a supplemental page definition, a page-level trigger, or a page-level index, not the AFP page definition resource.

For example, a bank-statement application produces a file with hundreds of individual customer statements. The file contains a header page before the customer statements and a trailer page at the end of the customer statements. Each statement ends with a page that separates it from the next statement. With AFP Indexer, you create triggers that define the header, trailer, and separator pages as supplemental pages with page definition names of Header, Trailer, and Separator. You can then create index tags on the supplemental pages.