Search For Text & Categorise

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davet8880
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Joined: 02/05/2020 - 05:28
Search For Text & Categorise

Hi,
Apologies if this has been asked before, I couldn't find it.
In our IDEA database we have a mass of expense data which we want to categorise for tax purposes. We have a large number of key words filtered into categories which I can happily locate and extract using the @ISNI function with a new child database created for each category. I am then adding a field to each of these newly created databases adding the category name to the field, e.g. "travel" and then joining this data back to the main database. Given I have about 20 categories and some expenses can fall into several categories so the parent database is getting multiple columns added when I only want one with all categories listed in the one field, is there a simpler method i can use for this?

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Brian Element
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Joined: 07/11/2012 - 19:57

In your output do you need to know that the expense was both "travel" and "hospitality" or only knowing it as travel is enough?

davet8880
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Joined: 02/05/2020 - 05:28

Hi Brian,
Thanks for your reply. Ideally I would want to flag that it was both and it would be optimal if it were in the same field.

davet8880
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Joined: 02/05/2020 - 05:28

Hi Brian,
I don't suppose you had any thoughts to the above did you?
Many thanks!

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Brian Element
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Joined: 07/11/2012 - 19:57

HI David,

The only thing I can think of without building an IDEAScript is that you continue doing an extract for each category and your category field you give it a different name for each category.  You then join those twenty files together and append a new field that combines those 20 fields.  You then combine this category file back to the original file with only the combined category field.  Probably not the solution you were looking for but about the only one that I can come up with.