Input Options

Dates

Format

Use the Dates Format setting to modify how Monarch Classic interprets dates extracted from a report.

Select the appropriate date format from the drop-down list:

• M/D/Y

• D/M/Y

• Y/M/D

Note: For detailed information on the supported date formats see Changing a field's type.

Range for 2-digit years

Use the Date Range setting to modify how Monarch Classic interprets dates for which the year is represented using only two digits. For example, the date 07-Mar-15 could refer to March 07, 1915 or March 07, 2015. The edit box lets you set the start date for a 100 year range that Monarch Classic will use to interpret the date. The default date range is set to 1950 - 2049.

You may select a starting date in the range 1901 – 1999. Note that you may also use 1900 as a starting date by entering this value for the StartYear in the Windows Registry at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Datawatch\Monarch\Settings\StartYear

Establishing an appropriate Starting Year

To establish an appropriate starting year, begin by examining your reports to determine the earliest two digit years that you are likely to encounter. Then set your date range to start on this date or perhaps 5 – 10 years earlier.

For example, if your reports include two-digit employee hire dates and your company is 30 years old, Monarch Classic's default Starting Date of 1950 will correctly interpret all two digit dates for your reports. You must examine all of your reports that contain two digit dates before establishing the starting year.

Extraction Patterns

Select the date and/or time pattern combinations that you expect your reports to have, and which you want  Monarch Classic to extract and convert:

• Date: Select if  you want Monarch Classic to look for a date.

• Date followed by Time: Select if you want Monarch Classic to accept date/time combinations where the date must adhere to the old established date syntax and the time must adhere to the time syntax described below. Between the date and time there may appear any non-digits. For example, 4/15/1957 at 10:30am is accepted as a date/time, whereas 4/15/1957 a1a2a3 10:30am is not accepted.

• Time:  Select if, when converting date/time data, you want Monarch Classic to look for a time. When the "Time" extraction pattern is enabled, Monarch Classic will extract time values having the following syntax:

• hh[:mm[:ss[.fff]]] [AM|PM|A.M.|P.M.]

  or 

  hhmmss[.fff]

  or 

  hhmm

  In the preceding examples ‘hh’ is hours, ‘mm’ is minutes, ‘ss’ is seconds, and ‘fff’ is fractions of seconds. Note that though Monarch Classic accepts up to 3 digits of fractions of seconds (i.e., millisecond resolution), the resulting time values are rounded to the nearest second.

  The AM/PM indicator is optional and may appear in either upper or lower case. No space is required between the time and the AM/PM indicator.

  Note: When an AM/PM indicator is present the time is interpreted on a 12-hour clock, otherwise it is interpreted on a 24-hour clock.

  The time separator character, if present, must be a colon (:). The decimal separator character may be either a period (.) or a comma (,), depending on the choice of decimal character.

  Examples

  "12:30:23" is 30 minutes and 23 seconds after noon.

  "00:00:00" is midnight.

  "12am" is midnight

  "0600" is 6:00 in the morning.

  "1800" is 6:00 in the evening.

  "1:59:59.499pm" is one second before 2:00 in the afternoon (rounded to the nearest second)

  "1:59:59.500pm" is 2:00 in the afternoon (rounded to the nearest second)

• Time followed by Date: Select if you want Monarch Classic to accept date/time combinations where the time must adhere to the time syntax described above and the date must adhere to the old established date syntax.

Note: Between the time and date there may appear any non-alphanumeric characters. For example 0800-April 15,1957 is accepted as a date/time, whereas 0800 on April 15,1957 is not accepted. Monarch Classic doesn’t accept alphanumeric characters between a time and a date because of the possible ambiguity with month names.

Numbers

Decimal Character

Use this setting to specify the character, either a period or a comma, that separates the integer component of a number from its decimal component.

While a period is the default decimal character, some countries use a comma as the decimal character.

Text

Trim leading and trailing spaces from Character and Memo fields

Enable Trim leading and trailing spaces from Character and Memo fields to have Monarch Classic automatically trim leading and trailing spaces from character and memo fields.

Redaction

Enable redaction of report fields

Select to turn on the redaction feature. This feature allows you to replace or mask out field values, so that only a representation of the field value is displayed and not the actual value.

When selected, you can enter the character to be used in the redaction (e.g., X) in the X-Over Character field. You can also choose to use random overstrike lengths for X-Over Text to further obfuscate the data values. 

Refer to Redacting Field Values for details.

Formatting

Encoding

Use this setting to specify the default report file format. The following encodings are supported by Monarch Classic:

• ASCII: Select to make Monarch Classic interpret report files as ASCII text and perform the conversion to ANSI. This is the default setting because most report files are created as ASCII text files.

• ANSI: Select to make Monarch Classic read report files as ANSI text and perform no conversion. While most report files are created as ASCII text files, report files generated from Windows applications may be created as ANSI text files. The difference lies with characters 128 - 255 in the character set: in these positions, the ANSI character set includes international characters not present in the ASCII character set.

• UTF-8  (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format): Select to make Monarch Classic interpret report files as UTF-8 files. UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode, which is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet it is backwards compatible with ASCII. If a valid BOM (Byte order mark) is detected within the input file, then Monarch Classic will automatically select the UTF-8 type when opening the file.

• UTF-16 LE (16-bit Unicode Transformation format, Little Endian): Select to make Monarch Classic interpret report files as UTF-16 LE files. UTF-16 LE is the Unicode Transformation Format that serializes a Unicode value as a sequence of two bytes, in little-endian format. If a valid BOM (Byte order mark) is detected within the input file, then Monarch Classic will automatically select the UTF-16 LE type when opening the file.
  Note: "Little Endian" means that the low-order byte of the number is stored in memory at the lowest address, and the high-order byte at the highest address. This is a function of the processor architecture. Windows, VAX/VMS, Digital Unix, Mac (Intel) are examples of little-endian systems. MIPS systems can often be configured to be either little-endian or big-endian. Linux can also be configured to run on little and big-endian hardware.

• UTF-16 BE (16-bit Unicode Transformation format, Big Endian): Select to make Monarch Classic interpret report files as UTF-16 BE files. UTF-16 BE is the Unicode Transformation Format that serializes a Unicode value as a sequence of two bytes, in big-endian format. If a valid BOM (Byte order mark) is detected within the input file, then Monarch Classic will automatically select the UTF-16 BE type when opening the file.
  Note: "Big Endian" means that the high-order byte of the number is stored in memory at the lowest address, and the low-order byte at the highest address. IBM mainframe, HP-UX, Solaris, the Java Virtual Machine and Mac (Motorola, PowerPC) are examples of big-endian systems.

• EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code): Select to make Monarch Classic interpret report files as EBCDIC files. EBCDIC is an eight-bit character encoding system used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM mid-range computer operating systems.

These options may also be accessed in open files by right-clicking on the report in Report view.

Choosing the Best Encoding for Use with Monarch Classic

With encodings other than ASCII or ANSI, Monarch Classic has to perform a transformation process when it opens the file. If you have control over the system that is generating files for Monarch Classic, consider choosing the encoding that is output by the system in order to optimize Monarch Classic performance. When doing so, keep in mind that UTF-16 files will be much larger in size than ASCII, ANSI and UTF-8.

Here is a list of the encodings that Monarch Classic supports in their preferred order, due to file size and transformation overhead:

•  ANSI

•  ASCII

• UTF-8

• UTF-16 LE

• UTF-16 BE

• EBCDIC

Code page

Select the appropriate code page to use with the chosen input file encoding format. This option is only applicable to the ASCII (14 codepages available), ANSI (10 codepages available), and EBCDIC (16 codepages available) encoding systems.

These options may also be accessed in open files by right-clicking on the report in Report view.

EBCDIC Options

When using EBCDIC files as inputs, the following file formats can be further selected:

• Auto - Selecting this option instructs Monarch Classic to automatically determine the record/line delimiter.

• Line Feed (LF) - This file type includes files where the end of record is an ASCII line feed character.

• Carriage Return (CR) -This file type includes files where the end of record is an ASCII carriage return character.

• EBCDIC New Line (NL) - This file type includes files where the end of record is an EBCDIC new line character.

• EBCDIC Line Feed (LF) - This file type includes files where the end of record is an EBCDIC line feed character.

• Fixed-length record - This file type includes files where each line (or record) consists of a fixed number of characters/bytes.

• Variable-length record - This file type includes files consisting of variable length lines (or records). Each record is preceded by a 4 byte record descriptor that specifies the record length.

• Variable length block - This file type includes files similar to variable-length records but also includes a block descriptor.

• Undefined-length record - This file type includes files with no defined record length or block.

• Custom byte as EOL - This file type includes files where the end of line is marked by a custom number of characters/bytes.

Ignore Print Control Characters

Select this setting to have Monarch Classic ignore all print control characters below ASCII 32 except for:

• Form Feed (ASCII 12)

• Line Feed (ASCII 10)

• Carriage Return (ASCII 13)

• TAB (ASCII 09)

• Null (ASCII 0) which is converted to a space (ASCII 32).

Hide n Leading characters on each line

When you download print files from a network, a mini-computer, or a mainframe, one or more extra characters may appear at the beginning of each line. The exact number and type of characters depends on the operating system. These introductory characters are typically used for form feed, carriage return, or line feed printer commands. They are usually not needed in a PC file and may affect the way the file is displayed by Monarch Classic.

A few communications programs are smart enough to either discard unnecessary characters or translate useful characters into the corresponding PC character codes. However, a form feed command is typically the only useful character you may get, and most communications programs are unable to translate it.

Use this setting to specify the number of leading characters to strip from each line of the report. Typical values are 0, 1, and 2. The value can be in the range 0 - 99.

For example, if you download from an IBM 3090 mainframe computer using an IRMA communications card, each line in the report will be preceded by two non-productive characters. You can strip those characters from the data by entering 2 in the Hide leading characters box.

Page Break

Ignore the Form Feed Character

Selecting this setting causes Monarch Classic to ignore all form feed (page break) characters in a report. Use this setting to turn off the hard-coded page breaks in a report file and replace them with page breaks based upon a Page Header trap or based upon the ForcePageBreakAfter n Lines setting (see below).

Page break on hidden leading text: n

For some mainframe and midrange system generated reports, especially from AS/400 systems, a page break could be indicated by a leading control character in the report file. This option allows you to hide the control character and to force a page break when a specified character is encountered.

Note: This option is not accessible unless you specify a Hide n Leading Characters setting.

Force page break after n lines

Use this setting to add page breaks to a file at regular intervals by specifying the number of lines you want on each page. Monarch Classic scans the report for existing page breaks and inserts a virtual page break whenever a real page break has not been encountered before the number of lines specified.

The action of this setting is modified by the ForcePageBreakLookAhead setting.

Data Types - Default sample size when detecting column data types

Instructs Monarch Classic to scan n number of rows when opening Excel workbooks to determine an appropriate data type for each column to be loaded. n may take on the following values:

• Minimal (8 rows)

• Normal (1024 rows)

• Maximum (16,384 rows)

Default engine to use for importing files from Excel

Instructs Monarch Classic to use the selected engine when importing tables from Excel files:

• Legacy

• Modern

Tick the Always substitute the Modern engine when loading a project or model which uses the legacy engine checkbox if you wish Monarch Classic to use the Modern engine exclusively when importing an Excel file that it detects to be using the legacy engine.

The option to convert currently open models or projects (regardless of engine used) to the Modern engine and then reload is also provided.

Note that Monarch Classic is unable to open password-protected Excel files using the ACE OLE DB connector. In this case, the Modern engine should be used. 

Trap Characters

Allows you to specify whether you want to use Monarch Classic's standard trap characters or the alternate ones. The Alternate trap characters have been chosen to be compatible with different languages, so that characters that are commonly used in a language are not chosen as wildcard trap characters. For example, in the standard trap character set, the Alpha Trap uses a character which is common in Portuguese, the Numeric Trap uses a character which is common in Spanish, the Blank trap uses a character which is common in German, and the non-blank trap uses a character that is common in Scandinavian languages.

• English (Standard):  Select to use Monarch Classic's standard trap characters. (This is the default setting.)

• Latin: Select to use Latin alternate trap characters.

• Low ASCII: Select to use Low ASCII alternate trap characters.

Note: The characters used in the Alternate trap set are all low ANSI, i.e., lower than character code 128, so they will be consistent across all code pages.

Refer to Trap_Characters on the Template Editor Action Bar to view the trap characters used.

Non-Regex are case-sensitive

Specifies whether or not non-Regex traps created are case-sensitive. If this box is checked, entering CUSTOMER in the Trap line to create a trap from a line with the word Customer will not highlight any report lines.

Default Japanese Font

Specifies the font to use when the input file contains Japanese characters.

Note: The recommended fonts for this setting are MS Gothic and MS Mincho.

Default Simplified Chinese Font

Specifies the font to use when the input file contains Simplified Chinese characters.

Note: The recommended font for this setting is NSimSun.

Default Traditional Chinese Font

Specifies the font to use when the input file contains Simplified Chinese characters.

Note: The recommended font for this setting is Chinese MingLiu.

Fullwidth Character Mode

When this options is set to On, it instructs Monarch Classic to detect fullwidth characters for file inputs using fullwidth characters,such as Japanese.

Turning this option on also enables the following:

• Ignore Character Width option on the search bar of Report View

• Japanese Date and Japanese Era Date sa Date/Time formats in the Input Field Properties Window or Field List Window

By default, this mode is set to Off.

Accuracy

Specifies the number of sample lines to display to check for accuracy when the AutoDefine functionality is applied.

Makes these default settings

Saves the current settings in the Registry as the defaults for future Monarch Classic sessions. Note: When closing the current model you will be prompted to save the model changes. You must select Yes to save the tab settings as the defaults. If you choose not to save the model changes, the tab settings will not be saved as the defaults.

Restore from default settings

Restores the settings to the most recently saved defaults in the Registry.