Indexing data

One of the main operations that you do with Content Manager OnDemand is to index reports.

When you index a report, Content Manager OnDemand extracts index values from the report and stores them in the database. The database fields that you define for your application groups hold the index values. When a user opens a folder, Content Manager OnDemand displays a list of search fields, which represent the database fields. To perform a query, the user enters values in the search fields. Content Manager OnDemand compares the values from the search values with the values in the database fields and retrieves the items that match the query.

When you index a report, you can divide a large report into smaller, uniquely identifiable units of information. For example, when an application program generates customer bills, it might produce a large print stream made up of thousands of individual customer bills. With Content Manager OnDemand, you can identify the individual customer bills within the report as smaller, separate information units, or logical items (known as documents in Content Manager OnDemand). Your users can search for and retrieve the logical items using identifiers such as account number, customer name, and date.

The reports that you process with Content Manager OnDemand generally fit into one of two categories:

Document. For reports made up of logical items, such as statements, bills, policies, and invoices.
Page. For reports that contain sorted values that either increase from the beginning of the report to the end of the report, or decrease from the beginning of the report to the end of the report, such as a transaction log or general ledger.

Reports that do not contain logical items or sorted line data can usually be indexed with the document indexing method.