Tips and Hints

AuditWare is the UK representative of IDEA.  They have a page with guides and tech tips that could be of interest for anyone using IDEA.  You can find the page here.

A friend of mine recently had a problem converting the date field from a JD Edwards sytem.  The JD Edwards date is a bit unique in that it is 6 digits long with the first digit indicating the century, the next two indicating the year and the final three indicating the number of days within the year.  I found this page that talks about the JD Edwards Date Conversion.

I had a friend of mine that was having a problem performing a join.  Some of the information he downloads from the web and pastes into an excel spreadsheet that he then imports into IDEA.  He was doing the join based on the persons name. 

When I looked at the two files and compared the name fields they looked exactly the same.  The field was in the format of First Name Last Name.  I then though that maybe one of the fields had spaces at the end that might have been screwing up the join so I used the view spaces function in IDEA to check it out.  Turns ou

I found this on the IDEA forum and thought it would be of interest:

The limitations in IDEA are  :

•Maximum number of records in a database is 2,147,483,647.
•Maximum record length in a database is 64,512 bytes.

•You can append or concatenate up to 32,768 databases, in the order selected, into a single database.
•A Numeric field cannot hold more than 17 digits, including decimal places. Any digits after the 17th digit will change to a zero. IDEA rounds values to the 16th digit.
•A Character field cannot contain more than 1024 characters.

Have you ever had those character fields where you just want a piece of information carved out and a simple @Left, @right, or @mid won’t work because the records in the field vary in length? Consider nesting other functions with those mentioned above to create some amazing one step results.

 NB.

1. Open <filename>.html with MS Word.
2. From the Page Layout tab, select Margins and then Custom Margins.
3. In the resulting dialog enter 0" for each margin, select Landscape as the orientation, and click OK.
4. On the resulting error dialog select Ingore to ensure that your selections stay in place.
5. Click Save As and then select PDF as the output type.
6. Give the file a name and save it to your working folder.

Now that you have the file in PDF format, you can use the Report Reader add-on to bring the file in to IDEA.

Have you ever waited for hours for a large PDF file to open up in Report Reader? If so, this tip is for you.

1. Using the Print Report and Adobe PDF option in IDEA’s Import Assistant, open the large PDF file.
2. When the file has finally opened and you are ready to build your JPM file, use Windows Explorer to IDEA's Temp Folder. To verify your Temp folder location in IDEA go to View/Options/Folders/Temporary Folder from within the software) (IDEA 8.5)
3. In here you will find a much smaller text file with a similar name as your original PDF file (largepdf.pdf).

This can happen if you open a dialog and IDEA appears to freeze up.  This will usually happen if you usually use two monitors and then detach one of them and only use one monitor.  The problem is not that IDEA is locking up but the problem is that IDEA has opened the dialog in the monitor that is no longer attached to the computer so you can no longer see the dialog.  How to get the dialog back, you must first hit Alt + Space at the same time, then hit M (l if you are using the French version of IDEA) and then you can use the cursor keys to move your dialog back onto the scre

In this next section I will talk about matching sets of characters.  The RegExp function allows you to define sets of characters to look for in your RegExp.  This is done by placing the range of characters between the [] brackets.

We will use the same example data as in the previous topic.  

Here is an example using the matching set of characters: @RegExpr(TEST_DATA, "[RS]a") This example will return the following:

Random Sampling.imd

I will start off this discussion of using regular expressions by doing some simple matching.  I have created a test data file that we will use for the examples.  The excel file has been attached so you can downloaded it and try it on your version of IDEA.  The test data contains some IDEA file names.

Test Data

BL Conform-Database.imd