Field length during syndication & Automatic scheduling

Question

Hi All,
I have 2 questions and need your valuable suggestions for same.
1) I have one field in MDM called Article code which contains value as 012345 thats 6 digit. My target system wants only 12345. Mean to say we need to do some settings in syndicator so that we can remove 0 and make it as 5 digit instead of 6 digit code.
2) Suppose I have schduled a automatic file generation in MDM that takes place in the evening 7PM daily. This will cover all the changes made in master data in whole day and will generate xml file covering all those changes. Let say on some day no changes were made. Then i need a file containing no values but it must generate a file atleast. How can we do this.
Please let me know if you ned any further info.
Thanks
Himanshu Nijhawan

Answer 1

Hi Himanshu,
See MAX ITEM LENGTH will take care of field value which will always have  <= 5 characters.
Suppose if you set only this property then if you have length with 6 character then it will eliminate the last char of value.
e.g. 012345 to 01234 which you actually not looking for so alone this property will not solve your problem.
If you also set this property too along with MAX ITEM LENGTH, I mean Leading Character to strip = 0, then it will always eliminate field value with all the leading character's to 0 first and then count max item length should not > 5
e.g. 012345 to 12345
       001234 to 1234 not 01234, if you want to contain 0 if it has length 5 then with leading char strip to 0 will not work.
It will work if your 5 char does not have leading zero. e.g 12345 to 12345  but not 01234 to 01234 but will result in 1234
So, If you are sure that when it comes to 5 char then it will not have leading 0 and for 6 char it will always have leading 0 then you can set these both properties in Syndicator and then can save in map which will give you desired result.
e.g. 12345 to 12345
e.g. 012345 to 12345
So, if you feel that you always want 5 char value irrespective of leading char 0 then you should go for this below approach.
e.g. you want when its 5 char value as 01234 and you want to maintain in the same manner during syndication 01234.
Here i would suggest go for assignment and write assignment expression as below in Data Manager.
IF(LEN(XXX) > 5 , RIGHT(XXX,5), XXX)
XXX is the Field name,  this expression pass for value > 5 , e.g 6 then it will give the last 5 char of value
e.g. 012345 to 12345
It fails when the field value is not > 5 that means = 5 then it will put this same value e.g. 01234 to 01234. So in this manner you will always have length of 5 char and you don't need to cut off the 1st char and need to do this for 6 char only.
Regards,
Mandeep Saini