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What are rules?

Introduction about rules and how to use them

Stéphane Jauffret avatar
Written by Stéphane Jauffret
Updated over a year ago

Rules are ways to automatically transform some content to comply to a particular constraint.

Rules contain actions and conditions, and allow to be extremely flexible in your transformations 🚀.

Whatever the type of rule, they always have the same structure: Conditions and Actions.

IF column XYZ Contains/is equal to/starts by etc... ABC

THEN do this particular transformation on the data

Inspiration of what rules can do

Here is a non exhaustive list of examples of what you could do:

  • Find and replace data in the file

  • Change some content and make it upper case or lower case

  • Change the decimal in a number

  • Round numbers up, down, to any granularity

  • Apply a change on a price, to increase it or reduce it, by a % or an amount

  • Make calculations based on several columns in the file

  • Truncate data that is too long

  • Add missing data, attributes in the original file

  • Remove lines that you don't want: those having certain keywords, length, or any other condition.

  • Split content from a given column into two different columns

  • Concatenate data coming from different parts in the file, into one single column

  • Change a date format, or the format of anything else in the file

  • Insert a new line in the destination file whenever a condition is met

  • Deduplicate the file based on certain conditions

  • etc.

The list of possibilities is pretty much endless and depends on your imagination.

All of this can be done with the help of functions, that you insert in your rules actions.

👉 Also bear in mind that if something is not possible right now, we can still add more functions and improve, usually very fast.

Rules can be used in different places

  • Default template rules: rules that you can write and will always be triggered at the end of all transform configurations when a given template is used, taking precedence over all other rules.

  • Solution rules: rules included in the error handling of a column, that are executed as a result of the user choosing a particular solution at the "review" level.

  • User rules: all other rules that the user can implement in his or her transform configuration.

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