Validating your PersisTables
The standard version of PersisTables provide a flexible mechanism for stripping data from Excel and saving it for future use. Its powerful data management framework allows data to be classified by Arena, Genre and Categories with the ability to look through an Arena to a fallback Arena saving data copying when undertaking acceptance testing. The premium edition of PersisTables provides a validation capability through its Data Dictionary. This allows the form and contents of a PersisTable to be checked before saving to ensure it follows the correct schema.
The Data Dictionary can be accessed from the context menu
Clicking on the ‘Generate’ option will insert a new sheet at the back of the current workbook with an outline schema matching the form of the Table in the selected cell.
This example is based on the ‘Sales Meeting’ PersisTables outlined in the user documentation.
The dictionary describes all the fields it finds in the Table and attempts to allocate a validation type to that data. It is not always successful as can be seen in cell C21 where it has assumed a Date is actually an Integer. We can tweak the schema by clicking on the Type field and selecting an appropriate validation method from the drop down menu.
Selecting Date as the type means the field will be validated as a date. There are a limited set of built in types that can be selected however more complex validation types can be created through the ‘Data Dictionary -> Manage Types’ menu option.
The Dictionary can validate a Table prior to it being saved. If the ‘Total Expenses’ field is set to Integer we can see that the original Table is no longer valid
This causes the validation of the field to fail as shown below.
The decimal value of the field fails the test of being an Integer.
Of course this is useful for manual checking a Table conforms to the appropriate schema but we can associate the Data Dictionary with a Genre so a PersisTable is checked before it is saved. This is done by saving the Dictionary into the Arena designated as the Dictionary Arena. It can then be linked to the appropriate Genre. Whenever a Table is saved to the Genre it is checked against the Data Dictionary to ensure it is of the correct format. Full details can be found in the User Guide.